God Has Smiled on Me – Isaiah Jones, Jr.

 

Can you picture God smiling? Perhaps it would not be hard to imagine such an expression on His face if we saw Him in the presence of children (see the artwork, Jesus and the children [1846], by Francisco Metrass), as we can read in some episodes (like in Matthew 19:13-14). Perhaps it was not unlike what Isaiah Jones, Jr. was thinking when he said “God Has Smiled on Me” in 1973, when he was a 33-year-old college graduate and in the midst of adulthood – hardly a child at that point. But lest any of us forget, we are all children to Him, despite how many years we’ve lived. So, it’s not something that ever grows irrelevant – this sense that His mercy and grace, His ‘smile’ on me, is imperative -- and indeed it becomes ever more important as I come closer to mortality’s end. Just imagine the alternative, if you dare. No one ever responds positively to a frown or a look of anger, do they?

 

Isaiah was probably somewhere in California, perhaps still near Los Angeles where he had received his college degree in 1972. Although we don’t know precisely what stirred his musical juices at the time, Isaiah’s declaration about God’s benevolence was evidently something about which he felt strongly and which would be something like his life’s motivating theme, such that he produced a songbook with that song title over 30 years later (see the reference to it below). To Isaiah, experiencing the freedom God provided was the result of God’s smile, and thus he voices some key phrases in connection to God’s goodness repeatedly throughout his musical testimony. Isaiah relates God’s goodness no less than 18 times; seven times he refers to God’s smile; and six times he sings of being free. It was obviously not so complicated for Isaiah to figure out, but maybe his own experience and that of his family, friends, and others convinced him that this simple message was one that would be best for daily living. Indeed, ‘a lamp unto my path’ was one of Isaiah’s lyrics that showed he knew of the psalmist’s recommendation for life guidance (Psalm 119:105). Get deep into His word, as the psalmist said, and so Isaiah turned one of that ancient songwriter’s most well-known expressions into one of his own in ‘God Has Smiled…’. The results of the psalmist’s application to Isaiah’s life would be ‘joy’ and ‘love’ directly from God, as well as ‘bread on my table’. Isaiah said goodbye to feeling ‘hungry’ and ‘lonely’ because of this Divine smile washing over him. When you watch or listen to Isaiah and others sing his song, there is no anxiety remaining, just deep contentment and a desire to sing these words and phrases over and over again. That communicates something – that His smile never departs.  

 

Wouldn’t it be great if we were all able to smile continually? It is something we do not experience, obviously, because existence here is difficult so often. Stuff happens, and it lingers. Jesus knew this too, for ‘He wept’ (John 11:35). That is comforting, in a way, to know that He wasn’t wearing rose-colored glasses while he walked here. In fact, Jesus’ life story, as told through artistic depictions of Him, rarely show Him wearing a grin; His life was filled with somber moments, so the gravitas we associate with Him is therefore appropriate. But should I, as His image-bearer and recipient of so much from Him, communicate only solemnity, particularly if it leans toward sullenness? Jesus had good moods too, like when a child was on His knee. And, I have to think that He’s pleased when I reflect Him to others and help them see the pleasure that He brings. The smile that creases His lips comes over anyone who can admit that they want what comes with His smile. Isaiah has told us what those are – freedom, hunger fulfillment, community (absence of lonesomeness), Godly love, and a direction for life. What other smile gives you all of that?      

 

The site indicates who is the author of the song in the year 1973: https://hymnary.org/text/he_is_the_source_of_all_my_joy

 

Read about the author here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Jones_Jr.

 

Listen to a rendition of the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKO8363pFQ

 

See the book the author produced >> Jones, Isaiah (2005). God Has Smiled on Me: An Isaiah Jones Songbook. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 112. ISBN 0-664-22879-8.

 

Information on the image is here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesus_acolhendo_as_criancinhas_(1846)_-_Francisco_Metrass_(Museu_de_Aveiro,_dep.%C2%BA).png... The author died in 1861, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1931.

Sweet Peace – Peter P. Bilhorn

Sometimes, a song is born through various episodes over an extended period, and such is the case of Peter Philip Bilhorn’s “Sweet Peace (The Gift of God’s Love)” in 1887. The two incidents that bookended Peter’s hymn began with one that we would readily say was sweetly suggested to Peter, but the second one that transpired months later was at the opposite end of the spectrum, something so horrible that it would cause nightmares. Evidently, the second one was what Peter really needed to prompt his hymn’s conclusion, a work that was inspired by his thoughts of Christ shedding blood (and shown in the painting Penitent, also known as Christ Bearing the Cross, by Niccolo Frangipane, in 1574). Does the nightmarish reality of what Jesus experienced really hit us the way He intended, and does that spur us devotionally forward? My response to Him is submission and sacrifice, but mine – unlike His – is on the other side of the crucifixion event. I need not die and endure the horrible as He did, and as my sin would otherwise cost me. He did it for me, and that great divine heart of His transports me into His own sacrifice and then onto a joyous, eternal plane – an upending of death into life.

 

Peter began this musical journey in New Jersey and then completed it in Illinois. He took part in a camp singing event that ended one evening with a friend suggesting that he write a song to suit her voice better; she casually remarked that ‘any sweet piece’ would do, a phrase that Peter copied down, intending to indeed meet her request by respelling piece into peace. Only the music and the new hymn’s title emerged following that episode, however. Months later, as Peter accompanied Dwight Moody and others on a train ride in Illinois, the train tragically hit and killed an old woman, whose blood covered a ditch alongside the tracks. As Peter and one of his companions (Daniel Whittle) considered what they’d just witnessed, thoughts of Jesus’ last hours crossed their minds, and how His death gave us ‘sweet peace’, an atonement that no human could acquire on his own. With these thoughts in mind, Peter wrote the words to this hymn on the concluding phase of the train trip. Peter’s thoughts in his hymn’s verse two are of Christ’s ‘death’, with ‘cross’ juxtaposed to ‘peace’. It’s not just peace, but sweet peace, a two-word expression that comes from deep within the soul that has first viewed the bloodied Messiah and realized His sacrifice’s import. Not even the horror of such a scene – crucifixion is often called one of the most gruesome methods of execution ever inflicted on humanity -- can blot out the thrill and the rapture of what He did three days later. Mangled bodies can be regenerated, even if flogged and nailed to a piece of wood, or hit by a train. 

 

Perhaps those two otherwise unrelated incidents that Peter beheld in New Jersey and in Illinois were not so inconsistent after all, but rather necessary to remind Peter of what Jesus did at Calvary and then later at the tomb of Arimathea. We don’t know what might have been said at the funeral of the woman hit by the train near Wheaton, Illinois in 1887, but perhaps it could have helped grief-stricken family to compare her death to the Lord’s, and then to be reminded that He rose in glory. One’s exit from life doesn’t have the last word. He does. Indeed, Jesus gave Himself up (Matthew 27:50/John 19:30), showing that He was in control of that episode. Sickness and pain and even death won’t trample my hope. His path to Golgotha had to be awful, so that His rising could demonstrate Divinity’s superiority over even the vilest penalty that could be imagined. Death cannot ever hold you and me, because our God has muted its evil voice. What more needs to be said? 

 

See more information on the song story in these sources: The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J. Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006; Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions by Kenneth W. Osbeck, Kregel Publications, 1990; and 101 More Hymn Stories, by Kenneth W. Osbeck, Kregel Publications, 1985.

 

See here for brief information about song’s story background: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/s/w/e/e/t/p/sweetpgg.htm

 

See information on the author here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/b/i/l/h/bilhorn_pp.htm

 

See information on the picture here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niccol%C3%B2_Frangipane_Penitent.jpg …The author died in 1600, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1931. …found inside this document -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus

 

Praise the Lord Who Reigns Above -- Charles Wesley

No one could have missed what this poet-songwriter was saying when he composed “Praise the Lord Who Reigns Above”, one of the thousands of works by Charles Wesley, an Englishman almost without peer in his phenomenal output. (See the flag of Wesley’s native England here.) His fundamental message was written in the hymn’s opening-title words. And, looking at some of the ancient texts of the songbook that his faith’s forbearers used, one could say that Charles was not afraid nor too proud to borrow a little from what preceded him. Good words flowed from the psalmists, Charles undoubtedly said to himself. So, it was not an accident that Charles got some spiritual and songwriting wind from one of those poets, catching the soul’s devotion that he recognized and decided to repeat in his own version of one of those, perhaps one that God’s own Son and His apostles might have voiced.

 

The word praise appears 10 times in Wesley’s four original verses, and that doesn’t capture all the other words that Wesley used to add some variety to how this praise could be offered. While Charles’s first verse says ‘praise’ four times to emphasize the theme of giving God credit for who He is and what He alone has been capable of doing, this 18^th Century writer was able to find alternate methods for offering God what He deserves in the following three verses. Praise is still on Charles’ lips in those verses another six times, but he adds words and phrases like ‘publish’, ‘spread’, ‘trumpet’s martial sound’, ‘proclaim’, ‘dance’, ‘raise’, ‘advance’, and ‘move’ in verse two alone to diversify the various ways to offer God the adulation a worshipper feels He deserves. Verse three continues this expansion of praise unto Him, with references to instruments other than the human voice – ‘harp’, ‘timbrels’ and ‘cymbals’, and ‘string’ -- telling us who pay attention that Charles thought Godly acclaim was unbounded, and to ‘celebrate’ with the ‘heart’s music’ could take many forms. Verse four was Charles drawing all living things into this orbit of praise to Him, as ‘every creature’ and ‘all things’ give it up for His glory.

 

Charles evidently thought and felt the same as the anonymous author of Psalm 150, as this 18^th Century offering seems to echo many of the same phrases, ideas, and structure present in that psalm; so we can hypothesize that Charles may have been drawing from his open bible and that specific passage for his inspiration. It also seems, to those who have examined the history of hymnody as it unfolded in old England after medieval times, that Wesley was consciously following in the footsteps of Isaac Watts from a generation earlier (in the late 1600s to early 1700s) with his own version of many psalms reworded. Indeed, besides the four verses that Wesley apparently wrote to parallel Psalm 150, another version of Charles’ hymn includes an unattributed verse that appears to be a rephrase of Psalm 97-98, thus carrying on the tradition that Watts and Wesley used in many of their works. It’s a way of saying with intentionality – and striking at the stoic and unbending nature of strict traditionalists – that God isn’t stuck on how you and I praise Him, that the exact words of the ancient Psalms aren’t absolutes. Instead, the keynote is that one word – praise. Whatever you and I do, make certain it is directed vertically. Not much else needs to be said, if we pay attention to how Charles directed his own heart, and ours too, centuries later. Thankfully, God is still making hearts in the same way as He always has.             

 

See here for some information about the hymn’s origin: https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/articles/history-of-hymns-praise-the-lord-who-reigns-above

 

See the original verses here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/p/l/w/r/plwreign.htm

 

Read about the author here: https://hymnary.org/person/Wesley_Charles and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wesley

 

See here for information on the flag image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_England.svg …This work has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible: The copyright holder grants any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law….found inside this document -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England