What Will Your Answer Be? -- Tillit S. Teddlie

 

Was this the only question he ever asked in song? It was the mid-1930s (perhaps about 1935), and Tillit Sydney Teddlie would live to double his age beyond that point in his life; yet, most likely he did not know he’d have so many more years to coax, encourage, and warn people about the eternal future with the words “What Will Your Answer Be?” He was a lifelong Texan, spending a large amount of his effort in Hunt County (northeastern Texas), though he got around to many of the surrounding counties during his 102 years on earth. Perhaps it was all the people to whom he’d preached or with whom he’d sung songs, up to his life’s midpoint, that prompted his question. And, there would be more than one question on his lips – in fact, a whole series of them. He evidently did not want to leave unchallenged the inertia he must have seen in so many people that he’d encountered. He’d already said what was on his heart so many times, probably to some of the same people yet again, but this time he approached them in a different way.

 

Tillit Teddlie wrote over 100 songs in his life, but this one in the mid-1930s may have been the only one with a question mark in it so prominently. He must have prodded and otherwise tried to convict and convince many wavering souls in the 85 years after he gave himself to God as a teenager. These episodes including singing school classes, sermon deliveries, and publication of 14 songbooks, all of which aimed to spread the Christian faith and the fellowship of believers. Among all that fellowship, including on his 100^th birthday celebration at a church in Dallas, it must have stung Tillit’s heart to ponder that perhaps some of those present, who hadn’t yet submitted to God, would be missing from the eternal fellowship. That’s the kind of moment one can imagine troubled Tillit the most, spawning the direct question he used to try to pierce the hard shell of each lost and indifferent person whom he met. No more beating around the bush, he might have said. ‘Where will you spend eternity?’ (chorus) Facing the divine judge is not a shrug-your-shoulders kind of moment, Tillit thought, and so he began his musical plea by setting that scene, and asking the question that was the song’s title. It’s a very personal self-examination that Tillit urges. If you don’t line yourself up for heaven, ‘What will (your) sentence be?’ (v.2), he asks bluntly. ‘…O, what will it be?’, he cries fervently in the last few words of this appeal. Tillit was after hearts, and if he had to break them to penetrate with the truth, that’s what might save some who were otherwise condemned. Make the God-Son your answer, this writer says (v.3), for the choice is yours. ‘Now is the time…’ (v.3), and you can sense that he’s trying to nudge the uncommitted gently, yet persistently.

 

How reasonable is it to love people, and not tell them what they need to know? Could that have been another question, perhaps between Tillit and himself, that helped compel his poetry here? With 100 years in the rearview mirror, how did Tillit feel about his life’s work and the countless numbers whom he had touched? In his innermost thoughts, Tillit might have admitted that there were some people whom he wished weren’t still on the outside looking in. But, none of us accomplishes all that we want to do, and that’s just part of the human experience. You’re never going to get it all right, nor be able to successfully field all of life’s questions. Tillit would have instead recommended that you and I need to ask and answer some questions with one overriding priority in mind. What is your highest priority today?         

 

 

 

See brief biography of the author here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/t/e/d/teddlie_ts.htm

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillit_Sidney_Teddlie

 

https://hymnary.org/person/Teddlie_Tillit

 

See biography on composer also in Our Garden of Song, edited by Gene C. Finley, Howard Publishing Company, West Monroe, Louisiana, 1980.

Oft We Come Together -- Tillit S. Teddlie

No real mysteries here, based upon the words that this preacher/teacher/publisher used in three verses. Tillit Sydney Teddlie made it pretty clear in “Oft We Come Together” what his motivation was when he penned the words and wrote the accompanying music in 1944, most likely while living in Texas. Some people say this part of the worship service, which Tillit seemed to be addressing, is the centerpiece of Christendom and a proper Sunday morning worship. Trays pass in front of people, and the main point is to remember and appreciate His gift, and reciprocate. This kind of commemoration, as Tillit saw it, was not intended for one-timers, but for believers who habitually and faithfully took time on a first day of the week for such a ceremony. That’s the reason for the first word he wrote – oft. It was a short little word that might have summed up Tillet Teddlie, a man who did a lot of good things regularly.

He had been a Christian for a pretty long time in 1944, and would continue on for several more decades, continuing to do the things that defined his life. Tillit Teddlie was close to 60 years old when he penned “Oft We Come Together”, a statement he probably had thought about and paraphrased from the pulpit he so often occupied. Though many in his family were musicians, Tillit reportedly did not take up writing most of the approximately 100 songs accredited to him and seriously teaching music until he was in his early 30s, continuing in this for some 60 years. Besides writing, Teddlie published over a dozen hymnals and served as a preacher and an evangelist in multiple places. So, for how many Sunday worship services or other events the other six days of the week had Tillit been present by 1944? Thousands, no doubt, perhaps something he’d contemplated as he considered what to say in three verses about something variously called ‘Communion’, the ‘Lord’s Supper’, or Eucharist. That time is special, even central to the Christian’s faith, so Tillit evidently wanted to vocalize and be certain he and his fellow believers did not take for granted what they did routinely. As one looks at the order of the verses Tillit wrote, you might ask ‘aren’t the thoughts a bit backwards in priority?’ ‘..we bring our offering’, Tillit says in verse 1, but we all know that normally comes third, after we’ve honored the Lord’s command to eat and drink of his body and blood. Right? So, what was Teddlie thinking?! Was it in fact the monetary offering? Or, maybe Tillit was thinking of the offering of worship in our hearts and minds, something that, after all, is necessary before one takes a bite out of that cracker and drinks a bit of juice (vv.2-3). We might imagine that Tillit addressed this issue with his hearers; when your offering of worship is right-minded, then you really don’t need to urge worshippers to give a physical offering – it comes naturally, as we contact the Divine spirit and sense His love. The refrain tells us that Tillit was in fact reminding his brethren that to worship ‘in truth and spirit’ was accomplished when we ask Him to ‘Help us…’.     

So, Tillit had some very simple advice for the worship service in which he had participated thousands of times. He undoubtedly had felt moved many times during that point in worship, and knew what – or, in fact, Who – made that moment special. He didn’t put God in the third person in his poetry, but spoke directly to Him. ‘Help us Lord’, he urges all of us to say. God is personal, so speak like you believe He’s present to hear your love song sung back to Him. Edify one another with that devotional message to Him who has saved you. Try thinking of it that way the next time you’re sitting there with the trays coming by and the sounds of people’s voices wafting through the room. Then, see how you feel. Do it again, and again -- 'oft', as Tillit said. Then, perhaps you and I will appreciate what he had discovered.       

See brief biography of the author here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/t/e/d/teddlie_ts.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillit_Sidney_Teddlie

https://hymnary.org/person/Teddlie_Tillit

Heaven Holds All to Me -- Tillit Sydney Teddlie

He evidently wanted his own gravestone to be a signpost, substituting for his voice in the time after which he expected to be gone. This fellow was pretty thoughtful, intentional, and hopeful that what words he crafted might survive his own mortal existence, and so it was when Tillit Sydney Teddlie wrote “Earth Holds No Treasures” (perhaps more commonly known as “Heaven Holds All to Me”) early in his life. He lived his entire life in Texas, but that wasn’t the home he thought about, and so he spent a notable amount of his time poetically reminding himself and others where he thought home would be. He couldn’t have known how many years into the future this expectation would endure before bearing fruit, but that’s how dreams affix themselves in one’s consciousness – over time. This poet demonstrated, well-past an average person’s retirement age, that a patience while awaiting one’s inheritance for many decades after first envisioning it doesn’t mean standing still.   

Tillit and his wife had the words of “Heaven Holds All…” inscribed on the memorial stone marking the site of their burial ground. It’s a shortened, bumper-sticker-like phrase that points to the longer version of what Teddlie thought about this eternity subject. Tillit was a 30-year old, still relatively young and less than one-third of the way toward his goal, as it would turn out, in 1915; he lived until 1987, having passed the century-mark two years earlier. Tillit was most likely somewhere in northeast Texas, in one of several small towns or perhaps in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, when he wrote about the abode where he would go some 70 years into the future. He was frequently engaged in teaching singing, a skill he’d first begun as a teenager over a decade earlier, though his talents weren’t limited to music. He preached at half a dozen churches in this region over his lifetime, while writing approximately 130 songs and publishing more than a dozen songbooks. His part in singing schools, where he taught others how use their vocal skills via reading shape notes in printed music, must have touched the lives of thousands of people over the course of six decades. How many more people would have encountered Tillit and his heavenward message while sitting near a pulpit or by using a songbook? He didn’t complicate it too much, but showed some unpretentious words were golden. The ‘treasures (that)…perish’ (v.1) and ‘world(ly)…sorrows’ (v.3) just didn’t stack up against a ‘joy without measure’ (refrain) he aimed to inherit. What he sought was invaluable. No one can calculate a songwriter’s impact, especially when his subject is so universally true for all of us. 

Though Tillit did not share the particular episode that inspired his poem, we can guess its words grew out of his everyday perspective. After all, what else would a preacher-songwriter, who was engaged in spreading good news, be thinking about virtually every day? He must have known of the adage regarding how to catch flies – you attract them to something (like honey), rather than trying to chase them away from where you don’t want them to be. Tillit must have known that no one could argue with or run away from being ‘happy, contented, and free’ (v. 2). He called it a ‘wonderful country’. My everyday life in America is pretty nice, but there are frustrations too, routinely. Tillit would, no doubt, have recommended an alternative.       

Brief biography is here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/t/e/d/teddlie_ts.htm

A more thorough portrayal of composer’s life is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillit_Sidney_Teddlie

See his obituary here: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11006462