The second post for each song of ascent features a video devotional from the Music Ministry of First United Methodist Church in Stephenville, Texas. These videos were a weekly devotional series during the 13 months that the church’s music ministry was apart during the pandemic. Each video offers a short reflection on the psalm and then a song or hymn based on it.
This post on Psalm 120 is about five minutes long, and the hymn (“O God of Love, Forever Blest”) begins at 3:00. The lyrics are old, but the melody is new enough not to have been in the hymnal I grew up with.
The hymn is in the hymnal my current church uses, and it includes the following prayer—an appropriate ending to this post:
“God of peace, in the middle of a world filled with warfare and violence, we pray for the coming of the Prince of Peace. We cling to your promise that you will break the bow and shatter the spear. We long to live up to our calling as instruments of peace. Through our prayers and through our actions, help us to plant seeds of peace. Then, by your Spirit, turn them into blossoms of hope, the fruit of righteousness. Amen.”[1]
Notes
[1] Lift Up Your Hearts: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, Faith Alive Christian Resources, 2013, copyright Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
Recent Comments