A Midnight Song 

There is power when we worship. Les Wheeldon reminded us on Sunday that when we come to God with our personal problems and issues, God says 'look up'. It is all too easy to be consumed by our own situation but when we look up at God and his power and majesty, our perspective changes. It says in Psalm 22 v 3 that 'God inhabits the praise of his people'. This is incredible. The Holy Spirit moves and works in us both individually and collectively when we worship and praise Him. Something greater in the spiritual world happens when we sing out to Him and declare who He is. It's not like when we sing along to our favourite song on the radio! Our worship is empowered by the Holy Spirit - and God works in miraculous ways.

There is no more powerful an example of this than in Acts 16, where Paul and Silas are wrongfully imprisoned in Philippi - stripped and beaten and 'thrown into the inner cell, with their feet bound in the stocks' (v22-24). In such a dire situation, at midnight they decide to pray and sing to God. In their darkest moment they sing. And it says that the other prisoners were listening to them. It must have been quite a shock in such notoriously horrific prison conditions, to hear two men singing and praising God. But because of it, the Holy Spirit came and 'an earthquake shook the foundations of the prison' and 'everyone's chains came loose' (v26). In the depths of the night a miracle happened when two men praised God. And it led to the jailer and his whole household coming to faith. What an incredible turn of events, all through the power of praise!

Tragedy and difficulties all strike us at different times in our lives, but I've been challenged that it's the songs we sing out to God in these darkest moments that change the trajectory of our lives. When we choose to praise Him and sing out then our inner self is crafted to become more like Jesus.

I've always been encouraged reading the stories behind famous Christian hymns we sing. It's often the case that the hymn writers have gone through the hardest of situations, yet still written songs of beauty and praise. They 'look up' to God despite facing tragedy in their own lives. This was the case of a young Irishman called Joseph Scriven who in 1844 returned home from studying to marry his sweetheart. On the day before their wedding, he found his treasured fiancee tragically lying under the water after falling off her horse. Scriven then moved to Canada and eventually fell in love again, only to face devastation when his wife-to-be became ill and died just weeks before their marriage.

I can't imagine how hard this must have been. The pain must have been unbearable, yet the following year he wrote a poem in a letter to his mother which was published anonymously entitled 'Pray without ceasing', describing the friendship with Jesus he experienced in prayer.

What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer

In 1868 a lawyer, Charles Converse set the lyrics to a tune and named it 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus'. The words in the second verse have always struck me:

O what peace we often forfeit
O what needless pain we bear
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer

It is when we choose to pray and praise God, peace follows. Let's turn to Jesus and sing our midnight songs to Him.

Listen to the hymn here: