Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove
Isaac Watts
Come, holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all thy quickening powers,
Kindle a flame of sacred love,
In these cold hearts of ours.
Look, how we grovel here below,
Fond of these trifling toys;
Our souls can neither fly nor go
To reach eternal joys.
In vain we tune our formal songs,
In vain we strive to rise;
Hosannas languish on our tongues,
And our devotion dies.
Dear Lord! and shall we ever lie
At this poor dying rate?
Our love so faint, so cold to thee,
And thine to us so great?
Come holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all thy quickening powers;
Come shed abroad a Saviour’s love,
And that shall kindle ours.
The line that grabs me in this hymn is “look how we grovel here below fond of these trifling toys”. Oh how true that is! We are so fond of little things that get in our way of communion with God. We are so afraid of losing things. We value the gifts of God more than the God of the gifts. We willingly walk into sin. Our love to God is so cold and His to us is so great. What a marvelous thing grace is! We must never sin to make grace abound, but the sad fact is that we hardly have to try to do that. We sin and grace will abound. We will strive for holiness. We will pray and commune and we will still fall. Oh how we grovel, being so fond of earthly toys.
Lord, thank you for the power and magnitude of the cross. Thank you for the sustaining power of Jesus Christ. Thank you that you do not tire of honouring your Son and thank you for the inestimable blessings that all this, and more, gives us. Words fail and yet even as we find our words inadequate and our hearts fill to overflowing with wonder at what God has done, we can still drift away and sin.
What a thing the human heart is!! How it can be filled with wonder one moment at the love of God and the next fall into some thought or act or word that just about comes from the pit. Oh Lord, if you do not save us we cannot be saved. If you do not forgive, we are utterly destroyed. Help us this day to put away useless things. Help us to use what you provide so that we are instruments of holiness in the hands of a great Master. Change our wanters so that our desires are always for the holy. Conform us more and more into the image of Christ and may we never be satisfied with the level of sanctification to which we have come.
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