In this week’s service, Rev. Peg Bowman reflected on the theme of giving thanks and glory to God for what we see in our lives. Through scripture readings from Psalms, 1 Corinthians, Mark chapter 7, and Revelation 21, Pastor Bowman highlighted glimpses of God’s glory that can be seen in nature, relationships, faithfulness to God, and ultimately, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
As Pastor Bowman noted, Fanny Crosby’s hymn “To God Be the Glory” gives us a glimpse into what we will feel when we first see Jesus in the world to come. We will experience eternal glory as described in Revelation 21: no temple needed, lit by the glory of God, with nations walking by its light and bringing their glory into it. Pastor Bowman encouraged those present to join her in giving thanks and glory to God for all these reasons and more, knowing that we will be surrounded by glory forever and ever if we love Jesus.
Transcript
Well, welcome to the final installation of our summer series on hymns. And today’s hymn is going to be a bit different from the other ones we’ve looked at so far. The hymns we’ve done up to this point were over 500 years old, and they were all inspired by events around the Protestant Reformation. And because of that, there’s a lot of heavy theology in those songs.
Not so much with today’s hymn, although today’s hymn is not a lightweight. Today’s hymn comes from a more recent time, and I think it’s sort of closer to us and where we are today than the hymns that we’ve looked at so far. So today’s hymn, To God Be the Glory, which we just sang, has some solid theology behind it, but it also comes from a time when revival was on people’s minds and hearts, both spiritually and socially. This was the time of the camp meetings that you’ve heard about in the history of the Methodist Church, when people would worship outdoors, sometimes for days on end, just camping outside.
And the camp meetings were designed, first off, to reach the lost for Jesus, and secondly, to raise money to feed the hungry and help the poor. The story behind To God Be the Glory is a very personal one, both in terms of who wrote it and in the terms of the faith being expressed in it. So let me start today with the hymn writer, because her life was truly miraculous. The woman who wrote To God Be the Glory was Frances Jane Crosby, better known as Fanny Crosby.
She was born in 1820 and died in 1915, almost 95 years old. And she was active in ministry for most of those years. She lived most of her life in New York City. Her ancestors included some of the people that came over on the Mayflower, Puritans who came to the New World to escape religious persecution.
And just as an aside, Fanny Crosby was also related to Bing Crosby somehow. I didn’t trace it, but apparently they had a common ancestor someplace. So Fanny Crosby was a lifelong Methodist. Of course, Methodist Episcopal back in those days.
She started writing hymns at the age of six, and that’s remarkable enough. But what makes it even more remarkable is that Fanny Crosby was blind. Historians are not sure whether she was born blind or whether her eyes were damaged at the age of six weeks when she had an eye infection. And back in those days, they didn’t really know how to treat eye infections well.
But the net result was, one way or the other, Fanny never remembered being able to see. But she never let her blindness hold her back. At a very early age, Fanny set herself a goal. She wanted to win a million people to Christ through her hymns.
And whenever she wrote a hymn, she prayed that it would bring women and men to Christ, and she kept careful records of those who reported to have been saved through hearing her hymns. Now, I don’t know if she ever reached that goal, but I want to point that out just as an encouragement to all of us, that if a work of art touches us, if it inspires our lives in some way, it’s a good thing to write or email those people whose creativity blesses us. But the vast majority of musicians and authors and poets and other creative people never know whose lives they touch by doing what they do. And it can be a great encouragement to hear from someone who has been blessed by their work.
Anyway, so like I said, I don’t know if Fanny ever hit that one million mark, but her hymns certainly touched many lives, and they still do. And I pray that God would give each one of us a vision of what we are created to do that will bless others in a similar way. And just as a side note, she wrote other hymns, she wrote a lot of hymns, but a few that you might know. Blessed Assurance, Tell Me the Story of Jesus, and Near the Cross.
Fanny Crosby attended school at the New York Institute for the Blind, which she entered at the age of 15, and by the age of 22, she was a teacher there. She taught English, rhetoric, and ancient history, which is kind of odd for a musician, but there we are. Lots of talent there. And there was not much that she couldn’t do.
And in her spare time, Fanny was also a lobbyist. She spoke before both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. on behalf of education in schools for the blind, and she was personal friends with Presidents James Polk and Grover Cleveland.
Fanny married a fellow teacher at the New York Institute, a man who was also blind, and who just happened to work as an organist on the side. And you would think, Oh, that would be cool, a hymn writer and an organist in the same family, but oddly enough, they never collaborated. They had different jobs and different music. The couple had one child together who sadly died in infancy.
And other than that, they did well. But as time went on, they discovered that they didn’t get along all that well as a couple, and eventually Fanny and her husband Van separated. They never divorced. They remained in touch with each other, remained friends for the rest of their lives, but they lived separately.
And as a woman living alone, Fanny learned how to live on very little. And even though she had a job and she had some royalties coming in from some of her poetry, as John Wesley himself taught, Fanny gave away anything she didn’t absolutely need. And eventually she ended up living in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, and then in the Bowery. And these are both locations that movies have been made out of for how bad things were back then.
She was right in the middle of that. And she personally provided for the needs of the people around her in those neighborhoods, the needs of the immigrants and the needs of the poor while she was living among them. So the hymn To God Be the Glory was written around 1870, published about five years later. We’re not sure exactly when.
Oddly enough, though, the hymn was heard first by some British musicians while they were visiting New York, and they took it back home to England, where the hymn became wildly popular during British revivals of the late 1800s. It in fact was included in the British Methodist hymnal back in 1933. But To God Be the Glory was never widely known here in the States until it was discovered by Cliff Barrows. And some of you might recognize that name.
He was the music director of the Billy Graham Crusades. Cliff Barrows introduced this hymn to the Crusades back in 1954, and the popularity just took off. So with all of this as background, what’s the message that Fanny Crosby wants to share in this hymn? Different people have answered that question in different ways. Some people say that the hymn is a planet-wide call to worship.
That’s actually not bad, actually. Everybody worship God, yes. Others have said it’s a description of how people are redeemed, how redemption works. For me, I think the best places to start is in 1 Corinthians 10, 31, where Paul says, Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.
So with all of this said, I’d like to turn to our scripture readings for today, which all point in the same direction. In Psalm 29, King David, the author, starts off by saying, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. And David goes on to praise the greatness of God that can be found in nature, and the greatness of God that can be found in God’s Word, and the greatness of God expressed in the praises of God’s people as they worship in the temple. So what exactly is glory, anyway? If somebody asked for a definition, what would we say? Glory’s a word we hear a lot in the Bible.
We know that glory’s a good thing. David comes close to answering that question in the Psalm when he says, God’s voice thunders and controls mighty waters. And I was thinking, if you ever tried to control water at all, even in a bathtub, right? You know how tough it is to get water to go where you want it to go. But God can control water.
He says, God’s voice breaks cedar trees and makes the land itself skip and flashes forth flames of fire. Glory is incredibly powerful, but it’s also incredibly good. The dictionary defines glory as renown, fame, honor, magnificence, splendor, grandeur, majesty. All of that combined up into one.
But the greatest glory is that God was willing to set aside all that glory for us and for our sakes. Paul tells us in Philippians 2-7 that Jesus laid aside his power and glory, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. That’s what God’s glory is all about.
In our New Testament reading for today, 1 Corinthians 10, Paul talks about glory from a different angle. He says, Do everything for the glory of God. In other words, whatever we do should shine God’s glory back to God. And Paul gives us an example from one of the controversies that was stirring back in his day.
Back in that day, Christians used to argue, you notice Christians are always arguing with each other, right? Back in the day, they used to argue over whether or not to eat meat that had been used in the worship of pagan gods. And in those days, most of the meat in the marketplace had at one time or another been an offering in a pagan worship. There wasn’t much other meat available. So some believers believed it was wrong to eat this meat because of its association with pagan worship, and for them, not eating it was the right thing to do.
Other believers believed, since pagan gods are false gods and therefore not gods at all, and because all things are given to us by the real God, it made no difference that the meat had been waved around in front of an idol. It meant nothing because the idol was nothing and it was perfectly okay to eat it. Paul agreed with the latter argument, that idols were nothing and it’s okay to eat. But if someone raised the issue, he said, if someone said, Hey, that meat you’re eating came from idol worship, then Paul says, Abstain from that meat for the sake of their conscience.
It’s better not to violate someone else’s conscience. So bottom line, believers are free to do what we know is right, but we are not free to put a stumbling block in front of somebody else. To the best of our abilities, we should be looking at the way we live and giving thanks and glory to God, and other people should be able to give thanks and glory to God for what they see in our lives. Our final reading for today is from Mark chapter 7, where we heard about two miraculous healings that Jesus performed.
In the first healing, a Gentile woman approaches Jesus and says that her young daughter’s being held captive by an unclean spirit, and she asks for healing. And she knows when she asks that she has two strikes against her at the very beginning in the eyes of society. First off, she’s a Gentile, and secondly, she’s a woman, and so social etiquette at that time said either one of those reasons was enough that she should not be speaking to Jesus in public. But she had heard better things about Jesus, so she didn’t give up.
And when he says to her, You don’t throw the children’s bread to the dogs, which seems to me like a very un-Jesus-like comment, my guess is that he was opening the door for her to put her faith into words. And she answered him, Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat what falls from the children’s table. And Jesus honored her faith and said, Yes. For the second healing of the deaf man, Mark gives us a lot of detail about what Jesus did physically, but there’s one detail that’s easy for us to miss, for those of us as Americans in the 21st century.
Mark tells us that Jesus and the disciples were passing through a region called the Decapolis, and very, very few Jewish people lived in the Decapolis, so most likely this man was also a Gentile. This might be one of the reasons why Jesus took him aside alone and said, Don’t tell people about this, because Jesus, when he was alive on earth, was sent for the people of Israel, the time of the Gentiles hadn’t come yet, almost, but not quite. The acceptance of the Gentiles into the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been predicted and prophesied in the book of Genesis, and God’s promise to Abraham was, In you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. But until Jesus came, the Jewish people were the only people to whom the word of God had been given.
They held the law of Moses, they held the Ten Commandments, and all the teachings of the prophets, and the Gentiles weren’t invited in. Sometimes came in anyway, but we were not invited in as a group until after Jesus’ resurrection. So in the book of Acts, when Peter was called to go into the house of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and he shared the gospel and the whole household believed and received the Holy Spirit, that was the beginning of the call to the Gentiles. And that caused a scandal among early believers until people understood that the Gentile believers were a fulfillment of prophecy.
And so here we are today in this church, most of us Gentiles who are still being blessed by the faithfulness of God’s chosen people. Anyway, all these scripture readings come together to give us glimpses of God’s glory. God’s glory in nature in the Psalms, God’s glory in our relationships in 1 Corinthians, and God’s glory in our relationship with God in Mark’s gospel. So in the hymn to God be the glory, Fanny Crosby gives glory to God for all these things, and specifically for three other things that she mentions.
She gives glory to God for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, which takes away our sin and opens the door of heaven for each one of us. She gives glory to God for the promises made in the Old Testament, which are fulfilled in Jesus. And in verse 3, Fanny gives us a glimpse of what we will feel when we first see Jesus in God’s kingdom in the world to come. In the end, when we are reunited with God face to face, we will see God’s glory.
And Revelation 21 describes something of what we will see in that eternal city. John writes, I saw no temple in the city, for the temple is the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
Its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. And that, brothers and sisters, is our future. Glory is the business of eternity.
For those of us who love Jesus, we will be surrounded by glory forever and ever, for all these reasons and more, we can join with Fannie Crosby in singing, To God be the glory.