Be Still My Soul

I do sometimes, and that is to take one of the great hymns of the faith and just reflect on it, meditate on it.

You might be someone like me, and this is not false humility here, it's actually true.

I for the life of me, struggle to remember the lyrics of hymns.

I often just can't remember them.

And sometimes that's even true with my favorite songs that I think I know by heart.

I'll often just mess up some of the words, much to the hilarity of my family, but it's not because I don't value the words' meaning.

Quite the opposite.

So for me, all the more reason to dig in one hymn per day this week, hymns that with one modern exception coming this Friday, hymns that have been sung for generations and across cultures and denominations, uniting God's people in praise, in song, and with formative, deep Christ-centered theology.

And Deep things do come from deep places in the souls of human beings where God has done something great.

So it's sort of like when you see a tall tree, you know there's an invisible root system in the ground just as big.

Or a tall skyscraper, you can be sure there's a carefully constructed foundation underneath.

As the saying goes, if you want to build tall, you have to dig deep.

And so today we'll be digging deep into the stories behind each of these hymns.

We'll start with Be Still My Soul.

The lyrics of every stanza apply Christ and the hope of the gospel to the anxious heart, the unsettled mind, the grieving soul, the person in a crisis of any kind.

And we'll talk more specifically about those things in a moment.