God is working His purpose out as year succeeds to year

One evening recently the Lord spoke these words very clearly to me: ‘All that we do is nothing worth unless God bless the deed.’ The words are taken from a really great hymn, God is working His purpose out as year succeeds to year. The theme is based on the verse in Habakkuk about the Earth being filled with the knowledge (yada) of the glory (kavod) of God as the waters cover the sea. (Habakkuk 2:14)(1) Almost everyone I have shared this hymn with in the last couple of days has commented on how it has aroused distant echoes of what it means to them when they sang it at primary school. Well, the words will mean a great deal more to you now – but aren’t we blessed to have this repository of great hymns lodged deep down inside us? The tune (Benson) is a great one too. It is sad to think that the present generation will not have this precious and godly heritage to draw on in later years. Today's songs may be better packaged and highly attractive but I very much doubt that they will impact the heart and memory in quite the same way. Being so close to lockdown of course there is no way we could record this with live musicians, so for the first time in all our many years of partnership with us, we have had to work differently, with Colin taking a starting midi file for pipe organ, and then extracting the parts to turn them into musical instruments. What wonders of technology. We were greatly blessed that Carol was free to sing and record this special lockdown offering. Carol and Colin sing it beautifully, and we ended up including not only a Yamaha concert piano and strings, but also an oboe, a clarinet, a Chinese flute, an Irish harp, a Fender Rhodes, French horns, a trumpet, a tuba, a cymbal, and - most importantly of course - a recorder(!) (We discarded others that we tried, including a snare drum and set of bagpipes!) It goes without saying that the better the speakers you listen to this through the more you will be able to hear those parts. May the Lord bless you at time when so many are feeling stressed, anxious and sad, and when prayer and godly endurance has never been more important. 1) Yada – ‘with the knowledge.’ This is not the kind of knowledge once gains from studying text books; it means to know (properly, to ascertain by seeing); and is used in the Scriptures in a great variety of senses, figuratively, literally, euphemistically and inferentially; ‘to know from experience and relationship’ in other words. May the whole earth be filled with people experiencing God through ever deepening personal relationship.