Sunday and Forgiveness

I have a prayer book.

Not this prayer book.  This one belonged to Lorenzo de Medici.

Weird for a Protestant, huh?  But it is a Protestant prayer book at least--Anglican.  I like it for both keeping my daily prayers from becoming rote, because the book has you change up parts of the prayer each day and each week.  And I also like it for those times when I'm too sick at heart to find words to pray, but I need prayer like I need breath.

I don't use it every day--the pages are as fine as tissue-paper, making it pretty un-baby-friendly--but I use it frequently enough to justify calling it a favorite resource.  But there's another resource I use every day, because I don't have to open it.  A different prayer book, if you like.

John Michael Talbot has some great songs that are simply liturgy put to classical guitar music.  They're old now, so old it cost me $40 to buy his sheet music collection (when, on the back of the used book that I got, it says clearly that the book originally cost $2.35).  But I like them--I find myself singing them through the day, when otherwise my prayers tend to get interrupted by one crisis or another.

It's easier, for some reason, to sing the Apostle's Creed, for instance, than it is to say it.  And it certainly helps me remember it.  (No, there's nothing magic about the Creed.  But it's a handy way to sum up Christianity if you happen to be talking to someone who doesn't know what Christianity is about.)  And there are lines in "Communion Song" that take my breath way, namely--

Christ has died

Christ has risen

Christ will come again

Dying, He destroys our dying

And rising He brings new life again

Come Lord Jesus!  Come again!

But the song that inspired me to write this post, which you will read Sunday morning, is called "We Shall Stand Forgiven."  The words of the song are a confession of guilt, but the title should clue you in to what Talbot wanted to emphasize.

I tried to find a Youtube version of the song, but apparently the only one has weird commune pictures on it and they won't allow it to be embedded, anyway.  So here's the link to Amazon so you can sample the MP3.

And here's the lyrics.

I confess to God, the Almighty

And to you, my brothers and my sisters

I have sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words

In the deeds that I've done, and in what I have failed to do,

I have sinned, I have sinned, I have sinned.

Now I ask you all of my brothers and my sisters to pray for me.

Will you pray for me? Unto the Lord.

Lord, have mercy.  Christ, have mercy.  Lord, have mercy upon us all.

Forgive us, Oh Lord--

Forgive us, Oh Lord--

And we shall stand forgiven.

This song helps me a lot, both because it's beautiful and calming and because it gives you something to DO with the sense of frustration and failure that comes from, yet again, realizing that you have forgotten a lesson you thought the Lord had finished teaching you.  Sing!

You admit it, first of all-- "I have sinned."  And then you ask for help--"Will you pray for me?"  Talbot's music lifts the phrase into an eloquent but desperate cry.  And then the song hammers it home:

Forgive us, oh Lord, and we shall stand forgiven.  If He forgives us, than we are really forgiven, and there's no sense in living as though we aren't.

That's been in my mind these last few days, so maybe you were meant to take the thought into the presence of the Lord this morning.  If you're His, you stand forgiven.  What will you do with that knowledge?

Cheers,

Breanna