281 Influencers

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Influencers”, originally shared on October 18, 2023. It was the 281^st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Musicians and other artists are often asked, “What are your influences?” That’s a good question for Christians, too. Today, we’re going to find out how influencers work in the Christian life.  

   Sally and I were at a gathering for churches of her denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)/UCC, the other day, and we took part in a short hymn-sing.

   It was led by an African American woman who clearly had a gift for presenting the Gospel in music.

   One of the hymns we sang was “Blessed Assurance.”

   The music for “Blessed Assurance” was written in 1873 by Methodist Phoebe Palmer Knapp (composer of over 500 Gospel hymn tunes and lyrics) who played the tune for Fanny Crosby (composer of over 8,000 Gospel hymn tunes and lyrics), also a Methodist, who had been blind since she was 6-weeks old. Ms. Crosby immediately spoke the first stanza,

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God

Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood”

   Some people don’t like these kinds of hymns because of their “Me and Jesus” message. Our relationship with Jesus Christ is personal, but it’s never private, it’s true.

   But many of those hymns are personally meaningful to others, and to me. They are among the things that have influenced Christians as a means of the Holy Spirit.

   I think of the Sundays when I was in college when members of the school’s student congregation went to visit people in a nursing home after worship. We would sing hymns, mostly requests, from the residents.

   Some of those hymns I had never heard of, but they were well worn standards to the people we sang for. Some brought people to tears.

   One of those hymns was “Blessed Assurance.”

   It begins clearly, with just me and Jesus, and then it introduces the Gospel message: “Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood.” It’s a message of grace.

   Detrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian murdered by the Nazis at the end of World War II, said that grace, God’s unearned love, is free but it’s not cheap. It’s not cheap because is cost God-made-flesh in Jesus Christ His life. His blood was poured out. The Christian life is lived in response; it has a certain substance.

   Bonhoeffer said, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

   Why were those old Gospel hymns so meaningful to the people we sang for? I think that one reason was that those were people who had lived the cost of discipleship and had been renewed. They were people to whom discipleship, the cross, and Jesus Christ, living and incarnate, were all their living reality.

   It’s like the person who was told that their faith was just a crutch who said, “It may be a crutch, but it holds me up.”

   Another reason might be the words ending the second verse, “echoes of mercy, whispers of love”, and at the end of the third, “filled with his goodness, lost in his love.” They are words of comfort.

   I think of the people I most admired when I was young, among my early influencers. They were the people in my church whose faith had a luminous quality.

   I wanted that and I tried to figure out where it came from. Then I realized that they had had great challenges and tragedy in their lives that had made faith difficult, but their faith had endured. They had needed comfort and had received it by God’s grace.

   Both of the final two (of three) verses of “Blessed Assurance” begin with the words, “Perfect submission…”

   And submission in our culture of radical individualism is hard. It’s counter-cultural hard.

   Singing “Blessed Assurance”, I found tears forming in my eyes for, I think, much different reasons than for those in the nursing home.

   I mourned for the faith that our culture, and even many places in our Church, is throwing away. I was struck by the hymn’s straightforward declaration of Jesus Christ, a kind that we rarely hear these days, even though it is our living reality. I was encouraged by its confession, its direct statement of faith. “Blessed Assurance” is a hymn that is a reminder to ourselves as well as to the world that we are a new creation, born again, a people set apart. The words “this is my story” sound to me like a statement of defiance.

   I once heard another hymn-sing leader lead the congregation in singing “Blessed Assurance”. He directed the congregation to slow down the first words of the chorus and sing each word loudly and clearly, “This-is-my-story,” and to hold the last word for an extra several seconds.

“This – is – my - stooreey, this is my song

Praising my Savior all the day long

This is my story, this is my song

Praising my Savior all the day long”

   I don’t know that everyone experienced that moment in the same way, but it was a very powerful moment for me.

   People who are influencers in the world today may be online, or are social media influencers, or may have perceived empathy and a connection with their “followers”, or may have positions of actual power, or may hold a high office, or may have education and experience, or they may have no qualifications at all other than that they are popular. The people don’t care. That’s nothing new.  But the numbers are.

   Unlike influencers of the past, they are not just someone at a meet-and-greet, or answering fan mail, or making a speech, or appearing on television, or making a statement in a movie or in print.

   Online, pop culture, and social media influencers today can speak directly, and in nearly real time, to millions of people. They can influence what those people buy, what they wear, how they spend their time, even what they think. They can make careers, and they can break them. Quickly.

   Online influencers can be a mile wide, but only an inch deep. They are powerful until they are not.

   The Holy Spirit speaks to us deeply, where we actually live. And the consequences are eternal. The Holy Spirit can speak to billions of people at the same time, as well as to just one at the right time.

   God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, the Holy Trinity has made us new. That’s influence! And when we are made new, even our understanding of Jesus becomes new. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:15-16,

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

   We don’t see the wind, but we see leaves moving and trees bending. We see its effects. We see transformation.

   Jesus says, in John 3:5-8,  [NOTE: the NRSV renders “born again” as “born from above”]

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶ What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

   Everything changes when we are made new.

   And everything that influences us changes as well. We seek influences that build us up, that draw us closer to God, that share our love for others and particularly for those who need it most, in our words and in our deeds. We want to glorify God, and we want to be with others who do as well.

   That means we might have to lose the “friends” that want to drag us back to the old life. It means being with people who share our faith. It means we get better friends. Sometimes the same goes even for our family.

   We have many influencers in our lives, our parents, our teachers, our media, our friends, social media, our churches, pastors, hymns, news sources, books, and a host of others.

   When we are born again, we live lives that are no longer necessarily influenced by them, even by what we think are the best of them, but only when the Holy Spirit speaks through them. The Holy Spirit speaks through means. And it transforms us.

   But the primary way that God speaks to us is through the Bible.

   Paul writes, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,

¹⁶ All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

   The word “inspired” contains the same root as “respire” and “respiration”. Some translations render it as “God-breathed”.

   The words, “pneuma” (pneumatic, pneumonia) in Greek and “ruach” in Hebrew have the same three meanings: wind, breath, and spirit”. It is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the writers of the books of the and, more importantly, that inspires us to understand what they mean.

   The Bible is authoritative not just for the words on the page, but for the living, present God who inspires us to understand them. That’s why the Bible has authority in any language, and in any faithful version in that language.

   That “This-is-my-stooreey!” moment in “Blessed Assurance” was powerful because of the influence of the Holy Spirit. “Born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.” It touched me as it has touched millions before me. Personally.

   The Christian life, both personally and for the whole people of God, is formed by the Holy Spirit speaking through many means, primarily through the Bible. We open our hearts so that we may be formed by the Influencer of all our influencers and live as God’s people.