Are You Coming to Jesus Tonight? -- Jessie Brown Pounds

 

This 28-year-old Ohioan asked a question over and over again in 1889, hoping it would sink into the hearts and minds of those who would listen. This was the method of Jessie Brown Pounds, but asking “Are You Coming to Jesus Tonight?” wasn’t just a question that she hoped would penetrate hearers’ spirits and make them think. This one entreaty that she uses in each of her five verses emerged each time from a different person or group, at least one of whom she must have trusted would ultimately soften the hardened shell of someone’s heart. It’s as if she’s saying ‘No one wants to be abandoned, and alone forever! Take the hand of your loved one, friend, and even God, and come join the happy and contented.’ Jessie even suggests that this calloused person should look inward, and not ignore the voice that is trying to tell one the truth. It’s the only truth that matters for all time. Know what it is?

 

Jessie had a well-honed gift for writing that she’d been developing for over ten years by the time she wrote her musical question late in the 19^th Century. Perhaps it was her subpar health and education at home that helped spur this talent on the farm in Hiram, in northern Ohio where she lived as a youngster. Although she eventually became a college graduate, Jessie’s career as a writer began in her mid-teens when she routinely offered some of her writing to editors of Cleveland-area newspapers and several religious journals, one of whom coaxed her to make the poems she crafted into hymns. Someone might say ‘And now you know the rest of the story’. Indeed, she produced several hundred hymn texts over the 60 years of her life, among them the one that she penned as a young woman in 1889. Even though many thought of her as a ‘new woman’, because of her higher education, Jessie also leaned on her Christian values to guide her life. Her hymn is likely one outgrowth of her association with journals that were part of the Stone-Campbell religious movement that was prevalent in the mid-to-late 19^th Century. What she wrote shows the major focus of that movement – Christ, and bringing people to faith in Him. While her repeated question implicitly urges a response, she also had various messengers beseech the reluctant souls in the poetry. Besides the ‘Savior’ (v.1) and the ‘Father’ (v.2), Jessie must have thought ‘loved ones’ (v.3) and ‘friends gone before’ (v.4) would be very influential in this evangelistic objective. She ultimately presses the hearer to ‘be true’ (v.5) to himself. Was there someone or group of people to whom Jessie was writing at the time? Was this personal, maybe with the song intended to coax a family member or close friend who was still uncommitted? Some things we will need to discover directly from her, in the next life.

 

Jessie made her question an offering, too. Her words read like gentle persuasion, not fire and brimstone warnings. This Father-God ‘implores’ and his ‘love…outpours’(v.2); while ‘loved ones entreat’ (v.3); and friends ‘tenderly say’ what needs to be said (v.4); and finally, all ‘these voices invite’ (v.5). Had she alternately tried another approach, that is as biblically true as the one she employed here? Hell is real, she must have told herself and, at times, others who needed to hear that such a place might be one’s horrible and eternal destination. But, perhaps Jessie thought of some other verses in which God and love are intermingled, especially where that writer said He is love itself (1 John 4:8). He invented it, has perfected it. And so, Jessie evidently thought the best way to point others to Him was by adopting His most basic characteristic when talking to others. She didn’t try to tell people how they should answer her question. She just asked.  

 

 

 

Biography of the author here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/p/o/u/n/pounds_jb.htm

 

See here also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_Brown_Pounds

 

See all the song’s verses and the refrain here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/a/r/e/y/areyouco.htm

Do You Know My Jesus? -- Vesphew Benton Ellis and William F. Lakey

 

Two partners who loved God and music -- that is the short description of “Vep” Ellis and Bill Lakey. They must have shared a lot of ideas with each other in the southeastern Tennessee music company where they both were in the mid-1950s, and from where they authored a song-question “Do You Know My Jesus?” There’s not a lot more that needs to be exposed in this, except that these two came up with more than a single question when they composed this song. Perhaps one of them thought the original question was so effective, that more questions to fill out the verses was the best way to embody their thoughts and coax hearers to an answer. It’s really the only answer, despite the multiple questions they ask.

 

Ellis and Lakey were collaborators while working for the Tennessee Music Company (in Cleveland, Tennessee), so one can imagine the two penned the words for ‘Do You Know…?’ while there in the 1956-57 period. It’s said that Lakey actually crafted the song’s chorus first, a set of simple words that composed a few questions. The questions are rhetorical, since neither Bill Lakey nor his partner, Vep Ellis, offered any direct answer for those who would listen to their queries. Or did they? By framing their words this way, and really describing what this Jesus does in each line they write, Ellis and Lakey offer Him as the solution. The original four questions that Bill offered in 1956 included three, in addition to the song title, that indicate Jesus has three important qualities that close the gap between us and Him: Divine versions of friendship, love, and an abiding presence. ‘Can anyone else meet these, the way He does’, is Lakey’s unspoken question. They must have impacted Vep Ellis and captured his own imagination, so that he composed another set of eight questions, ones that intend to pierce the hard shell of the person who’s grown calloused. Vep’s three verses reportedly emerged the following year, in 1957, so his friend’s chorus words were working on him for many months, until his own thoughts coalesced around some key human struggles. We humans become ‘weary’, and need ‘rest’ (v.1). And, we have things that are deep inside our ‘heart(s)’, and experience ‘sorrow’ that needs salve (v.2). Vep examines those heart issues even more in verse 3 with several synonyms -- our ‘disappointments’, the ‘cry’ each of us voices, the ‘heartaches’ we feel, and ‘tears’ that we shed. It’s as if Vep is saying ‘don’t run and try to deny that you have things that sting’.  Perhaps Bill and Vep were moved by an individual they’d encountered, someone who seemed to be at a dead end emotionally and spiritually. Or, was this autobiographical for either Bill or Vep? We’ll have to ask them later (unless someone out there in blogger-land can provide some more insight!).

 

Are Bill’s and Vep’s questions deep inside, or on the very surface, for you? Either way, these two offer one prescription. Could it be that their solution is suggested through inference, because they’d surmised that what works best on the human psyche is discovery of an answer on one’s own, to admit to oneself what is needed? Even God doesn’t try to force my devotion. He instead tries, in His divine calculus, to draw me toward Himself. Yes, the option of walking away from Him is there, even though it’s an awful one, compared to Him. Just look inside yourself, Bill and Vep might say. Nobody else is there to coerce you. Be real with yourself. What are your answers?    

 

See brief biography here on author: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/e/l/l/i/ellis_vb.htm

 

See a fellow blogger’s thoughts/research on this song: https://hymnstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/do-you-know-my-jesus/  

 

See more here: https://hymnary.org/person/Ellis_VB

O Why Not Tonight? -- Elizabeth Reed

 

This Englishwoman was 48, was married to a London-area minister, and contributed twenty hymns to a collection that her minister-husband published. You can tell from the poetry that she wrote that it might have been her husband who had in mind the question “O Why Not Tonight?”, perhaps as a closer for a message that he used to coax a crowd of listeners. Was it a nighttime service when Elizabeth Reed and her husband (Andrew) first spoke these few words, which were published in 1842? Or was the ‘tonight’ just a metaphor for the people with whom he reasoned, folks he thought he might not see again, and who might not have another opportunity to make their eternal destiny secure? This kind of message – and warning, really – does not grow old, and is not confined to just one country on the planet (see the Reeds’ native England’s flag here). Urgency is not something to be ignored, they might have said.

 

Elizabeth and Andrew Reed both wrote a handful of hymns while ministering in the London area, where they were reportedly involved in many charitable activities. Those efforts must have contributed to a desire to touch the lives of those they met, including addressing more than the physical needs those people might have had. There’s no record to indicate what Elizabeth Reed’s precise reason was for composing ‘O Why Not…’, but her words show she was very conscious of people’s spiritual condition. And so, she did not beat around the bush when the time came for making a most consequential decision. ‘Why not?, she asks repeatedly. She voices some immutable truths about all of us, that we will eventually not see ‘…tomorrow’s …sun rise..’ (v.2). If that seems depressing, it is nevertheless absolutely true. But, she reminds hearers of another absolute truth: it is He who can lift us above the penalty we would otherwise pay. God or His way are variously described as ‘the Word’ or ‘light’ (v.1), and ‘Lord’ (vv.2,5), but it’s interesting that He’s not posed as a God who will judge or condemn us for unbelief (though that is true). Instead, the ever-present struggle and source of spiritual disease is within us – a ‘harden (ing) (of) your heart’ (v.1), and ‘long deluded sight’ (v.2) and ‘stubborn will’ (v.3) are the debilitating human tendencies that Elizabeth must have observed constantly. Meanwhile, He watches us ‘in pity’, with ‘His love’ available to us if it’s ‘requite(d)’ (v.3). Elizabeth’s prescription for ending the internal battles we humans and our environment wage is to keep asking the question that is the song’s title, and then conclude each verse with the only rational choice -- ‘Be saved…’. Who wouldn’t do that, if given the opportunity? The Reeds were present to make certain that people knew each soul was not in a hopeless state. There is a solution.

 

How many answered the questions that Elizabeth posed with a ‘yes’? We can only guess that more could have answered ‘yes’ than actually did when given the choice. Maybe the Reeds’ charity work helped them get a foothold with those to whom they spoke, perhaps with some who otherwise might have rejected their message out-of-hand. Nothing will bring attention to my being like a struggle, so one can imagine that Elizabeth and Andrew Reed sought out those who were in straits. Am I in that place, too? Take a peek through a looking glass. It could be a rearview mirror you’re using, or maybe a telescope that helps you see something that’s still off in the distance; or, maybe you’re staring right at your own mug in a mirror, today. Whatever time it is, a skirmish is part of the landscape where I’m at, or have been, or will be in the future. Elizabeth didn’t ask another question, but maybe it was implicit in her poem: Are you tired of the struggle? If ‘yes’, she had an answer, the only one that makes sense.   

 

 

Very brief biography of author: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/r/e/e/d/reed_eh.htm

 

See more biographic information here: https://hymnary.org/person/Reed_EH

 

Four verses of the song here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/w/h/y/owhynott.htm