Archive for the 'Poetry' Category

Quotes on the Lord’s Day

“I am no admirer of a gloomy religion. Let no one suppose that I want Sunday to be a day of sadness and unhappiness. I want every Christian to be a happy man: I wish him to have ‘joy and peace in believing,’ and to ‘rejoice in hope of the glory of God.’ I want everyone to regard Sunday as the brightest, cheerfulest day of all the seven; and I tell everyone who finds such a Sunday as I advocate a wearisome day, that there is something sadly wrong in the state of his heart. I tell him plainly that if he cannot enjoy a ‘holy’ Sunday, the fault is not in the day, but in his own soul.” – J.C. Ryle

“A well-spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth. For this reason we wish our Sabbaths to he wholly given to God. We love to spend the whole time in the public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as is taken up in the works of necessity and mercy. We love to rise early on that morning, and to sit up late, that we may have a long day with God.” - Robert Murray M’Cheyne

O day of rest and gladness, O day of joy and light,
O balm of care and sadness, most beautiful, most bright:
On Thee, the high and lowly, through ages joined in tune,
Sing holy, holy, holy, to the great God Triune.

On Thee, at the creation, the light first had its birth;
On Thee, for our salvation, Christ rose from depths of earth;
On Thee, our Lord, victorious, the Spirit sent from heaven,
And thus on Thee, most glorious, a triple light was given.

Thou art a port, protected from storms that round us rise;
A garden, intersected with streams of paradise;
Thou art a cooling fountain in life’s dry, dreary sand;
From thee, like Pisgah’s mountain, we view our promised land.

Today on weary nations the heavenly manna falls;
To holy convocations the silver trumpet calls,
Where Gospel light is glowing with pure and radiant beams,
And living water flowing, with soul refreshing streams.

New graces ever gaining from this our day of rest,
We reach the rest remaining to spirits of the blessed.
To Holy Ghost be praises, to Father, and to Son;
The church her voice upraises to Thee, blessed Three in One.

Through Brier and Bush

Soft nature seeks a path of ease
Secure from strange alarms;
Borne through the troubled scenes of life
In Christ’s protecting arms;
Yet nobler far our strength to draw
From grace to call His will our law.

For Christ who knows our feeble mould
Ordains that here below
Through brier and bush to heavenly ground
His bairns wet-shod must go;
Past hostile thorn His steps to trace
And follow still with steadfast face.

Our heav’n is in the bud and soon
Must to a harvest grow;
For time’s brief span shall eat away
And root out every woe.
Then watch in hope till sorrows end,
And Christ appear — our living Friend.

Written by Faith Cook, based on Samuel Rutherford’s Letter 131