Sing a New Song                                                           11/27/49

 

Scripture:  Read  Isaiah 42: 1-12

 

Text:  Isaiah 42: 10a

 

I have seldom preached what might be called a “biographical sermon,” and so I purpose to give you a bit of variety by doing that today.  I refer your attention to a man of more than two centuries ago - a Congregational clergyman of England.  In the spring of 1714, he was in charge of a London chapel, was sick, was discouraged, and believed that death was very near for him.

 

A former lord mayor of London invited this ailing minister out to his beautiful estate at Hertfordshire for a week.  There the guest could feast his eyes on beautiful gardens, splendid trees and wide fields, himself surrounded by congenial friends and physical comfort.  The week having passed very quickly indeed, he was invited to stay longer.  Then he was invited to make his home there and to become a sort of private chaplain to the family.  He accepted.  What had first been planned as a week’s visit for a man soon to die, became an extended stay of 34 years!  It proved to be a happy arrangement which gave him a renewed leasehold on life and the opportunity to write some 40 books and a collection of Christian hymns that have made him famous through all of the years since.  His hymns are sung in a wide variety of churches.  Because of their widely accepted, universal character, these hymns are a force transcending doctrinal and organizational difference.  They might be called an “ecumenical force” in the Christian churches of today.  For we can all “sing the Lord’s song” together.

 

The man to whom I refer is Isaac Watts.  Actually, his life was not at all dramatic.  He was born in 1674 at Southampton, the eldest in a family of eight children.  His father was a boarding-house keeper, and religiously was a Nonconformist.  There was deep piety and faith in that household -- an earnestness in religion that characterized many of the dissenting families.  They lived in a time of stern intolerance which often cast its shadow over the family.

 

A few days after the birth of Isaac, Mr. Watts began a term of more than a year in the Southampton jail because he preferred to worship in the fellowship led by the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson rather than in the established Church of England.  Daily, Mrs. Watts would take the young child to the jail and, while seated on the horseblock outside the entrance, feed the little fellow within sight of the imprisoned father.

 

When Isaac was 9 years old, his father began another incarceration of six months for the same reason.  Upon his release, Mr. Watts spent two years away from his family, hiding in London.  This family experience left a well defined mark on the sensitive youngster.  We may well understand what a price men have paid to win the freedom to go through the door of the church of their choice on Sunday mornings!

 

In a home like that of the Watts family, religion achieved at such high personal cost was the motivating force of every action.  The reading and study of the Bible, daily prayers in the family, and regular attendance at public worship were valued and practiced.  This was part of Isaac’s education.  Also, he studied at a local grammar school where a clergyman was teacher.

 

In 1688, revolution brought freedom of worship to every Englishman.  In the same year, Isaac Watts, now 14 years of age, experienced a conversion which culminated his religious training, and he joined his father’s church.  Because of his intellectual gifts, a friend of the family offered to have him enrolled in one of the universities.  This would have required attendance at a college chapel where the book of common prayer was used and would have led toward a career as an ordained minister of the Church of England.  Isaac refused to compromise his religious beliefs, refused the attractive offer, and instead spent 4 years at an academy for free-church young men.

 

Deeply emotional and sensitive, he had a constitution weak from birth.  Long hours of hard study depleted his strength, and he was frequently ill.  During one of these periods of invalidism, while he was 20, he made his first effort at hymn-writing.  He was recuperating with his family at Southampton.  Returning one Sunday from a church service with his father, he ridiculed the stiff, wooden, metrical version of the Psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins which then generally used in the churches.  His father suggested that, since he disliked to sing these hymns, he try his hand at composing better ones.  And so the young man began work immediately on hymns of his own composition, though it was some years before any were published.

 

Isaac Watts entered the ministry, officially, with a sermon preached as a layman in 1698, on July 16th, when he was 24 years old.  His effort showed such promise that he was made assistant to the minister at Mark Lane Congregational Church in London.  Four years after that, he was ordained and made pastor of the Mark Lane church.  The congregation lost its building, worshipped for a time in Pruner’s Hall, and finally built its own edifice -- the Bury Street Chapel.  Watts proved to be a preacher of freshness and vigor, thoughtful and stimulating.  The only complaint made by the congregation was that they would have liked to see him oftener in their homes.  (T’would seem that time for pastoral visitation has been a problem for ministers of many generations!)

 

Romance came to Isaac Watts’ life but once.  In correspondence with Miss Elizabeth Singer, those two found a basis of common religious and poetical interest.  However, Miss Singer was not impressed favorably with his appearance when they met.  What she saw was a man only 5 feet tall, with sallow face, hooked nose, prominent cheek bones, small eyes and deathlike color.  Her ardor immediately cooled, and when he proposed marriage, she refused him.  However they remained cordial friends, even after she married someone else.  It may be hard to realize that certain children’s hymns written by Watts were from the pen of a bachelor!

 

After three years in the ordained ministry, when he was 30 years of age, Isaac Watts’ first book of hymns and religious essays was published.  Two years later, in 1707, his famous “Hymns and Spiritual Songs” was published.  It contained 222 compositions.  Two more years, and this book was published in a revision which had grown to 365 compositions, including the one we last sang:  “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

 

By this time, he had been 4 years a guest of Sir Thomas Abney.  His health was still poor.  His absences from the Bury Street Chapel grew longer.  Finally he wrote a touching letter of resignation.  It must have been a hard decision to make.  In the same year, the last of his hymn collections appeared: “The Psalms of David Imitated.”  This included more of the hymns which have since become generally used.

 

Then arose bitter opposition and attack on his hymns -- led, unhappily, by one of his best friends, the Rev. Thomas Bradbury.  It is difficult, now, to realize what an innovation these hymns were in churches which had continued to use the old paraphrases of the psalms.  Some churches refused to sing the new hymns at all.  Others worked out a compromise by concentrating all of the hymn singing at the close of the service, so that those who preferred not to participate might leave first.  But the need of the people to express their praise of God in words more congenial to their experience gradually won out and gave Isaac Watts’ hymns their immortality.

 

It has been remarked that, as a hymn-writer, Watts died at the age of 44 though he lived on for another 30 years.  These last 30 years were spent writing controversial books of theology.  He wrote a book on logic which was a textbook at Oxford.  In 1728 Edinburgh conferred upon him the degree Doctor of Divinity.  He died on November 25, 1748, aged 74.  His body was laid to rest in Bunhill Fields Cemetery in London.  And his friends marked the spot with an altar-like tombstone.  A commemorative tablet was also erected in Westminster Abbey.

 

Despite the quantity and quality of his theological and other writing, it is his hymns which are remembered as Isaac Watts’ immortal gift to generations of Christian worshippers.  They are a faithful record of a soul that wrestled in prayer before God and made us heirs of a spiritual victory.  These hymns of Watts are a happy phrasing of religious truth.  They are also an expression of personal experience - his and ours.  The words “I”, “me”, “mine” appear often.  We are prone to express our religious belief in abstractions, in impersonal terms, today.  We are shy about personal testimony of a religious nature - either a bit embarrassed, or perhaps possessed of a feeling that things sacred to us are not lightly to be uttered.  Also, we have become accustomed, in the 20th century, to social expressions of religious implications.  And we are hesitant over a personal outpouring of emotion and conviction.

 

But, vastly important as is the application of religious truth to our society, Jesus still appeals to us as individuals for personal discipleship.  No society can be Christian without the personal consecration of individual members of society.  The “follow me” of Jesus is a call to persons.  Watts’ hymns underline this fundamental truth.  It is good for us when our hearts are strangely warmed in the great encompassing love of God for each of us.

 

It is easy for us to be involved in a circle of discontrol.  If we assume that we have no control over our emotions, which do have great power over our actions; yet that we do have great power over our ideas, which have little power over our emotions; we have little real direction over the course of our living.  One important suggestion in breaking down this barrier of discontrol is in reflective meditation such as one engages in at public worship or in private prayer.  We cannot afford to fear emotion nor can we let it be uncontrolled.  For by emotion we control our habits.

 

The Christian religion is characterized among the religions of the world as a religion of salvation.  In Christ, people are brought out of despair, out of cynicism, into a new realm of God, with fresh hope, fresh purpose, new and righteous values, affirmation of the redemption and worth of the individual person.

 

The author of the hymn:  “When I survey the wondrous cross, where the young prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride,” knew that he had been redeemed at tremendous cost!  He was positive that no sacrifice of his could completely compensate for what had been done for him.  And he put in words that which is a conviction of many of us.

 

The hymnal that we are presently using in this church contains 10 of Isaac Watts’ best hymns.  We began our service in the words of one, continued with another, and will now bring our worship to conclusion with another.

 

            O God, our help in ages past,

            Our hope for years to come;

            Our shelter from the stormy blast,

            And our eternal home.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 27,1949