Podcast appearances and mentions of William Cowper

“Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.” —William Cowper 

“As for man, his days are like grass.” It isn't much of a stretch, then, when Cowper sees his own mortality in a grove of felled poplars. Happy reading.William Cowper (1731-1800) was a renowned 18th century poet, hymnographer, and translator of Homer. His most famous works include his 5000-line poem ‘The Task' and some charming and light-hearted verses, not least ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin'. Phrases he coined such as ‘Variety is the spice of life' are still in popular use today. While living in Olney he collaborated on ‘The Olney Hymns' with his friend John Newton. -bio via the Cowper and Newton Museum This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Send us a textWhile many Christians enjoy contemporary Christian music (and some of it is really good!), most mature Christians appreciate the God-centered, Gospel-centered, rich theology of hymns. In this episode, we look at the fascinating story behind one of those timeless hymns,  "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood," and the heartbreaking story of its writer, William Cowper. Credit to Clearnote Church, Bloomington, IN performing "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1WRt1Ag5gIThanks for tuning in! Be sure to check out everything Proverbs 9:10 on our website, www.proverbs910ministries.com! You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Rumble, YouTube, Twitter, Truth Social, and Gettr!

Als Josiah in Jerusalem König wurde, beauftragte er Arbeiter mit der Reparatur des Tempels. Dort fanden sie in den Ruinen eine Abschrift des Gesetzes Gottes. Seit Jahren hatte es niemand mehr gesehen! Josiah kam schnell zu dem Schluss, dass der Götzendienst in Juda direkt in der Tatsache begründet war, dass das Volk aufgehört hatte, Gottes Wort zu lesen. Also versammelte er das ganze Volk, las ihm das Gesetz Gottes vor und führte es dazu, nach den Grundsätzen von Gottes Wort zu leben. Verliere hier nicht den Zusammenhang aus den Augen! Das Versäumnis, Gottes Wort zu lesen und danach zu leben, führte das Volk Gottes zum Götzendienst. Welche Prioritäten Gott für dein Leben gesetzt hat, erfährst du in der Bibel. Wenn du es versäumst, die Bibel zu lesen, zu studieren und über ihre Gebote nachzudenken, wirst du dich irgendwann auf deine eigenen Interessen konzentrieren und Gottes Prioritäten vernachlässigen. Und alles, was man über Gott erhebt, ist ein “Götze”. Manchmal ist der Götze eine Gewohnheit, von der du weißt, dass sie falsch ist. Aber ein Götze kann auch etwas Legitimes sein, wie Arbeit, Beziehung oder ein besonderes Interesse, das so viel Zeit und Energie beansprucht, dass die Beziehung zu Gott vernachlässigt oder ganz aufgegeben wird. William Cowper schrieb: „Das liebste Götzenbild, das ich kenne, hilf mir, es von deinem Thron zu reißen und nur dich anzubeten.“ Wenn du Gott besser kennenlernen, ihm näherkommen und ihm den ersten Platz in deinem Leben geben willst, dann nimm dir jeden Tag Zeit für sein Wort.

In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out is from there. We read Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Milton, and Pope. We both love Pope! (He should be regarded as one of the very best English poets, like Milton.) There are also readings of Herrick, Bronte, Cowper, and MacNiece. I plan to record the whole of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes' at some point soon.Here are our lists and below is the transcript (which may have more errors than usual, sorry!)HOGod Tier* Shakespeare“if not first, in the very first line”* Chaucer* Spenser* Milton* Wordsworth* Eliot—argue for Pope here, not usually includedSecond Tier* Donne* Herbert* Keats* Dryden* Gawain poet* Tom O'Bedlam poetThird Tier* Yeats* Tennyson* Hopkins* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* MarvellJMShakespeareTier* ShakespeareTier 1* Chaucer* Milton* WordsworthTier 2* Donne* Eliot* Keats* Tennyson* Spencer* Marvell* PopeTier 3* Yeats* Hopkins* Blake* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* Thomas Hardy* Larkin* PlathHenry: Today I'm talking to James Marriott, Times columnist, and more importantly, the writer of the Substack Cultural Capital. And we are going to argue about who are the best poets in the English language. James, welcome.James: Thanks very much for having me. I feel I should preface my appearance so that I don't bring your podcast and disrepute saying that I'm maybe here less as an expert of poetry and more as somebody who's willing to have strong and potentially species opinions. I'm more of a lover of poetry than I would claim to be any kind of academic expert, just in case anybody thinks that I'm trying to produce any definitive answer to the question that we're tackling.Henry: Yeah, no, I mean that's the same for me. We're not professors, we're just very opinionated boys. So we have lists.James: We do.Henry: And we're going to debate our lists, but what we do agree is that if we're having a top 20 English poets, Shakespeare is automatically in the God Tier and there's nothing to discuss.James: Yeah, he's in a category of his own. I think the way of, because I guess the plan we've gone for is to rather than to rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 into sort of, what is it, three or four broad categories that we're competing over.Henry: Yes, yes. TiersJames: I think is a more kind of reasonable way to approach it rather than trying to argue exactly why it should be one place above Shelly or I don't know, whatever.Henry: It's also just an excuse to talk about poets.James: Yes.Henry: Good. So then we have a sort of top tier, if not the first, in the very first line as it were, and you've got different people. To me, you've got Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth. I would also add Spenser and T.S. Eliot. So what's your problem with Spenser?James: Well, my problem is ignorance in that it's a while since I've read the Fairy Queen, which I did at university. Partly is just that looking back through it now and from what I remember of university, I mean it is not so much that I have anything against Spenser. It's quite how much I have in favour of Milton and Wordsworth and Chaucer, and I'm totally willing to be argued against on this, but I just can't think that Spenser is in quite the same league as lovely as many passages of the Fairy Queen are.Henry: So my case for Spenser is firstly, if you go through something like the Oxford Book of English Verse or some other comparable anthology, he's getting a similar page count to Shakespeare and Milton, he is important in that way. Second, it's not just the fairy queen, there's the Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets, the wedding poems, and they're all highly accomplished. The Shepherd's Calendar particularly is really, really brilliant work. I think I enjoyed that more as an undergraduate, actually, much as I love the Fairy Queen. And the third thing is that the Fairy Queen is a very, very great epic. I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment. There were lots of other epics knocking around in the 16th century that nobody wants to read now or I mean, obviously specialists want to read, but if we could persuade a few more people, a few more ordinary readers to pick up the fairy queen, they would love it.James: Yes, and I was rereading before he came on air, the Bower of Bliss episode, which I think is from the second book, which is just a beautifully lush passage, passage of writing. It was really, I mean, you can see why Keats was so much influenced by it. The point about Spenser's breadth is an interesting one because Milton is in my top category below Shakespeare, but I think I'm placing him there pretty much only on the basis of Paradise Lost. I think if we didn't have Paradise Lost, Milton may not even be in this competition at all for me, very little. I know. I don't know if this is a heresy, I've got much less time for Milton's minor works. There's Samuel Johnson pretty much summed up my feelings on Lycidas when he said there was nothing new. Whatever images it can supply are long ago, exhausted, and I do feel there's a certain sort of dryness to Milton's minor stuff. I mean, I can find things like Il Penseroso and L'Allegro pretty enough, but I mean, I think really the central achievement is Paradise Lost, whereas Spenser might be in contention, as you say, from if you didn't have the Fairy Queen, you've got Shepherd's Calendar, and all this other sort of other stuff, but Paradise Lost is just so massive for me.Henry: But if someone just tomorrow came out and said, oh, we found a whole book of minor poetry by Virgil and it's all pretty average, you wouldn't say, oh, well Virgil's less of a great poet.James: No, absolutely, and that's why I've stuck Milton right at the top. It's just sort of interesting how unbelievably good Paradise Lost is and how, in my opinion, how much less inspiring the stuff that comes after it is Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained I really much pleasure out of at all and how, I mean the early I think slightly dry Milton is unbelievably accomplished, but Samuel Johnson seems to say in that quote is a very accomplished use of ancient slightly worn out tropes, and he's of putting together these old ideas in a brilliant manner and he has this sort of, I mean I guess he's one of your late bloomers. I can't quite remember how old he is when he publishes Paradise Lost.Henry: Oh, he is. Oh, writing it in his fifties. Yeah.James: Yeah, this just extraordinary thing that's totally unlike anything else in English literature and of all the poems that we're going to talk about, I think is the one that has probably given me most pleasure in my life and the one that I probably return to most often if not to read all the way through then to just go over my favourite bits and pieces of it.Henry: A lot of people will think Milton is heavy and full of weird references to the ancient world and learned and biblical and not very readable for want of a better word. Can you talk us out of that? To be one of the great poets, they do have to have some readability, right?James: Yeah, I think so, and it's certainly how I felt. I mean I think it's not a trivial objection to have to Milton. It's certainly how I found him. He was my special author paper at university and I totally didn't get on with him. There was something about his massive brilliance that I felt. I remember feeling like trying to write about Paradise Lost was trying to kind of scratch a huge block of marble with your nails. There's no way to get a handle on it. I just couldn't work out what to get ahold of, and it's only I think later in adulthood maybe reading him under a little less pressure that I've come to really love him. I mean, the thing I would always say to people to look out for in Milton, but it's his most immediate pleasure and the thing that still is what sends shivers done my spine about him is the kind of cosmic scale of Paradise Lost, and it's almost got this sort of sci-fi massiveness to it. One of my very favourite passages, which I may inflict on you, we did agree that we could inflict poetry on one another.Henry: Please, pleaseJames: It's a detail from the first book of Paradise Lost. Milton's talking about Satan's architect in hell Mulciber, and this is a little explanation of who or part of his explanation of who Mulciber is, and he says, Nor was his name unheard or unadoredIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day, and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith, like a falling star,On Lemnos, th' Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,ErringI just think it's the sort of total massiveness of that universe that “from the zenith to like a falling star”. I just can't think of any other poet in English or that I've ever read in any language, frankly, even in translation, who has that sort of scale about it, and I think that's what can most give immediate pleasure. The other thing I love about that passage is this is part of the kind of grandeur of Milton is that you get this extraordinary passage about an angel falling from heaven down to th' Aegean Isle who's then going to go to hell and the little parenthetic remark at the end, the perm just rolls on, thus they relate erring and paradise lost is such this massive grand thing that it can contain this enormous cosmic tragedy as a kind of little parenthetical thing. I also think the crystal battlements are lovely, so wonderful kind of sci-fi detail.Henry: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it's under appreciated that Milton was a hugely important influence on Charles Darwin who was a bit like you always rereading it when he was young, especially on the beagle voyage. He took it with him and quotes it in his letters sometimes, and it is not insignificant the way that paradise loss affects him in terms of when he writes his own epic thinking at this level, thinking at this scale, thinking at the level of the whole universe, how does the whole thing fit together? What's the order behind the little movements of everything? So Milton's reach I think is actually quite far into the culture even beyond the poets.James: That's fascinating. Do you have a particular favourite bit of Paradise Lost?Henry: I do, but I don't have it with me because I disorganised and couldn't find my copy.James: That's fair.Henry: What I want to do is to read one of the sonnets because I do think he's a very, very good sonnet writer, even if I'm going to let the Lycidas thing go, because I'm not going to publicly argue against Samuel Johnson.When I consider how my light is spent,Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,And that one Talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker, and presentMy true account, lest he returning chide;“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”I fondly ask. But patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not needEither man's work or his own gifts; who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speedAnd post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:They also serve who only stand and wait.”I think that's great.James: Yeah. Okay. It is good.Henry: Yeah. I think the minor poems are very uneven, but there are lots of gems.James: Yeah, I mean he is a genius. It would be very weird if all the minor poems were s**t, which is not really what I'm trying… I guess I have a sort of slightly austere category too. I just do Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, but we are agreed on Wordsworth, aren't we? That he belongs here.Henry: So my feeling is that the story of English poetry is something like Chaucer Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot create a kind of spine. These are the great innovators. They're writing the major works, they're the most influential. All the cliches are true. Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. Shakespeare didn't single handedly invent modern English, but he did more than all the rest of them put together. Milton is the English Homer. Wordsworth is the English Homer, but of the speech of the ordinary man. All these old things, these are all true and these are all colossal achievements and I don't really feel that we should be picking between them. I think Spenser wrote an epic that stands alongside the works of Shakespeare and Milton in words with T.S. Eliot whose poetry, frankly I do not love in the way that I love some of the other great English writers cannot be denied his position as one of the great inventors.James: Yeah, I completely agree. It's funny, I think, I mean I really do love T.S. Eliot. Someone else had spent a lot of time rereading. I'm not quite sure why he hasn't gone into quite my top category, but I think I had this—Henry: Is it because he didn't like Milton and you're not having it?James: Maybe that's part of it. I think my thought something went more along the lines of if I cut, I don't quite feel like I'm going to put John Donne in the same league as Milton, but then it seems weird to put Eliot above Donne and then I don't know that, I mean there's not a very particularly fleshed out thought, but on Wordsworth, why is Wordsworth there for you? What do you think, what do you think are the perms that make the argument for Wordsworth having his place at the very top?Henry: Well, I think the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes and the Prelude are all of it, aren't they? I'm not a lover of the rest, and I think the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is one of the great works of literary criticism, which is another coin in his jar if you like, but in a funny way, he's much more revolutionary than T.S. Eliot. We think of modernism as the great revolution and the great sort of bringing of all the newness, but modernism relies on Wordsworth so much, relies on the idea that tradition can be subsumed into ordinary voice, ordinary speech, the passage in the Wasteland where he has all of them talking in the bar. Closing time please, closing time please. You can't have that without Wordsworth and—James: I think I completely agree with what you're saying.Henry: Yeah, so I think that's for me is the basis of it that he might be the great innovator of English poetry.James: Yeah, I think you're right because I've got, I mean again, waiting someone out of my depth here, but I can't think of anybody else who had sort of specifically and perhaps even ideologically set out to write a kind of high poetry that sounded like ordinary speech, I guess. I mean, Wordsworth again is somebody who I didn't particularly like at university and I think it's precisely about plainness that can make him initially off-putting. There's a Matthew Arnold quote where he says of Wordsworth something like He has no style. Henry: Such a Matthew Arnold thing to say.James: I mean think it's the beginning of an appreciation, but there's a real blankness to words with I think again can almost mislead you into thinking there's nothing there when you first encounter him. But yeah, I think for me, Tintern Abbey is maybe the best poem in the English language.Henry: Tintern Abbey is great. The Intimations of Immortality Ode is superb. Again, I don't have it with me, but the Poems in Two Volumes. There are so many wonderful things in there. I had a real, when I was an undergraduate, I had read some Wordsworth, but I hadn't really read a lot and I thought of I as you do as the daffodils poet, and so I read Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes, and I had one of these electrical conversion moments like, oh, the daffodils, that is nothing. The worst possible thing for Wordsworth is that he's remembered as this daffodils poet. When you read the Intimations of Immortality, do you just think of all the things he could have been remembered for? It's diminishing.James: It's so easy to get into him wrong because the other slightly wrong way in is through, I mean maybe this is a prejudice that isn't widely shared, but the stuff that I've never particularly managed to really enjoy is all the slightly worthy stuff about beggars and deformed people and maimed soldiers. Wandering around on roads in the lake district has always been less appealing to me, and that was maybe why I didn't totally get on with 'em at first, and I mean, there's some bad words with poetry. I was looking up the infamous lines from the form that were mocked even at the time where you know the lines that go, You see a little muddy pond Of water never dry. I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, and the sort of plainness condescend into banality at Wordsworth's worst moments, which come more frequently later in his career.Henry: Yes, yes. I'm going to read a little bit of the Intimations ode because I want to share some of this so-called plainness at its best. This is the third section. They're all very short Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,And while the young lambs boundAs to the tabor's sound,To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,And all the earth is gay;Land and seaGive themselves up to jollity,And with the heart of MayDoth every Beast keep holiday;—Thou Child of Joy,Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.And I think it's unthinkable that someone would write like this today. It would be cringe, but we're going to have a new sincerity. It's coming. It's in some ways it's already here and I think Wordsworth will maybe get a different sort of attention when that happens because that's a really high level of writing to be able to do that without it descending into what you just read. In the late Wordsworth there's a lot of that really bad stuff.James: Yeah, I mean the fact that he wrote some of that bad stuff I guess is a sign of quite how carefully the early stuff is treading that knife edge of tripping into banality. Can I read you my favourite bit of Tintern Abbey?Henry: Oh yes. That is one of the great poems.James: Yeah, I just think one of mean I, the most profound poem ever, probably for me. So this is him looking out over the landscape of Tinton Abbey. I mean these are unbelievably famous lines, so I'm sure everybody listening will know them, but they are so good And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.I mean in a poem, it's just that is mind blowingly good to me?Henry: Yeah. I'm going to look up another section from the Prelude, which used to be in the Oxford Book, but it isn't in the Ricks edition and I don't really know whyJames: He doesn't have much of the Prelude does he?Henry: I don't think he has any…James: Yeah.Henry: So this is from an early section when the young Wordsworth is a young boy and he's going off, I think he's sneaking out at night to row on the lake as you do when you with Wordsworth, and the initial description is of a mountain. She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;It's so much like that in Wordsworth. It's just,James: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Prelude is full of things like that. I think that is probably one of the best moments, possibly the best moments of the prelude. But yeah, I mean it's just total genius isn't it?Henry: I think he's very, very important and yeah, much more important than T.S. Eliot who is, I put him in the same category, but I can see why you didn't.James: You do have a little note saying Pope, question mark or something I think, don't you, in the document.Henry: So the six I gave as the spine of English literature and everything, that's an uncontroversial view. I think Pope should be one of those people. I think we should see Pope as being on a level with Milton and Wordsworth, and I think he's got a very mixed reputation, but I think he was just as inventive, just as important. I think you are a Pope fan, just as clever, just as moving, and it baffles me that he's not more commonly regarded as part of this great spine running through the history of English literature and between Milton and Wordsworth. If you don't have Pope, I think it's a missing link if you like.James: I mean, I wouldn't maybe go as far as you, I love Pope. Pope was really the first perch I ever loved. I remember finding a little volume of Pope in a box of books. My school library was chucking out, and that was the first book of poetry I read and took seriously. I guess he sort of suffers by the fact that we are seeing all of this through the lens of the romantics. All our taste about Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser has been formed by the romantics and hope's way of writing the Satires. This sort of society poetry I think is just totally doesn't conform to our idea of what poetry should be doing or what poetry is. Is there absolutely or virtually nobody reads Dryden nowadays. It's just not what we think poetry is for that whole Augustine 18th century idea that poetry is for writing epistles to people to explain philosophical concepts to them or to diss your enemies and rivals or to write a kind of Duncia explaining why everyone you know is a moron. That's just really, I guess Byron is the last major, is the only of figure who is in that tradition who would be a popular figure nowadays with things like English bards and scotch reviewers. But that whole idea of poetry I think was really alien to us. And I mean I'm probably formed by that prejudice because I really do love Pope, but I don't love him as much as the other people we've discussed.Henry: I think part of his problem is that he's clever and rational and we want our poems always to be about moods, which may be, I think why George Herbert, who we've both got reasonably high is also quite underrated. He's very clever. He's always think George Herbert's always thinking, and when someone like Shakespeare or Milton is thinking, they do it in such a way that you might not notice and that you might just carry on with the story. And if you do see that they're thinking you can enjoy that as well. Whereas Pope is just explicitly always thinking and maybe lecturing, hectoring, being very grand with you and as you say, calling you an idiot. But there are so many excellent bits of Pope and I just think technically he can sustain a thought or an argument over half a dozen or a dozen lines and keep the rhyme scheme moving and it's never forced, and he never has to do that thing where he puts the words in a stupid order just to make the rhyme work. He's got such an elegance and a balance of composition, which again, as you say, we live under romantic ideals, not classical ones. But that doesn't mean we should be blind to the level of his accomplishment, which is really, really very high. I mean, Samuel Johnson basically thought that Alexander Pope had finished English poetry. We have the end of history. He had the end of English poetry. Pope, he's brought us to the mightiest of the heroic couplers and he's done it. It's all over.James: The other thing about Pope that I think makes us underrate him is that he's very charming. And I think charm is a quality we're not big on is that sort of, but I think some of Pope's charm is so moving. One of my favourite poems of his is, do you know the Epistle to Miss Blount on going into the country? The poem to the young girl who's been having a fashionable season in London then is sent to the boring countryside to stay with an aunt. And it's this, it's not like a romantic love poem, it's not distraught or hectic. It's just a sort of wonderful act of sympathy with this potentially slightly airheaded young girl who's been sent to the countryside, which you'd rather go to operas and plays and flirt with people. And there's a real sort of delicate in it that isn't overblown and isn't dramatic, but is extremely charming. And I think that's again, another quality that perhaps we're prone not to totally appreciate in the 21st century. It's almost the kind of highest form of politeness and sympathyHenry: And the prevailing quality in Pope is wit: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What often was thought, but ne'er so well expressed”. And I think wit can be quite alienating for an audience because it is a kind of superior form of literary art. This is why people don't read as much Swift as he deserves because he's so witty and so scornful that a lot of people will read him and think, well, I don't like you.James: And that point about what oft was thought and ne'er so well expressed again, is a very classical idea. The poet who puts not quite conventional wisdom, but something that's been thought before in the best possible words, really suffers with the romantic idea of originality. The poet has to say something utterly new. Whereas for Pope, the sort of ideas that he express, some of the philosophical ideas are not as profound in original perhaps as words with, but he's very elegant proponent of them.Henry: And we love b******g people in our culture, and I feel like the Dunciad should be more popular because it is just, I can't remember who said this, but someone said it's probably the most under appreciated great poem in English, and that's got to be true. It's full of absolute zingers. There's one moment where he's described the whole crowd of them or all these poets who he considers to be deeply inferior, and it turns out he was right because no one reads them anymore. And you need footnotes to know who they are. I mean, no one cares. And he says, “equal your merits, equal is your din”. This kind of abuse is a really high art, and we ought to love that. We love that on Twitter. And I think things like the Rape of the Lock also could be more popular.James: I love the Rape of the Lock . I mean, I think anybody is not reading Pope and is looking for a way in, I think the Rape of the Lock is the way in, isn't it? Because it's just such a charming, lovely, funny poem.Henry: It is. And probably it suffers because the whole idea of mock heroic now is lost to us. But it's a bit like it's the literary equivalent of people writing a sort of mini epic about someone like Elon Musk or some other very prominent figure in the culture and using lots of heroic imagery from the great epics of Homer and Virgil and from the Bible and all these things, but putting them into a very diminished state. So instead of being grand, it becomes comic. It's like turning a God into a cartoon. And Pope is easily the best writer that we have for that kind of thing. Dryden, but he's the genius on it.James: Yeah, no, he totally is. I guess it's another reason he's under appreciated is that our culture is just much less worshipful of epic than the 18th century culture was. The 18th century was obsessed with trying to write epics and trying to imitate epics. I mean, I think to a lot of Pope's contemporaries, the achievement they might've been expecting people to talk about in 300 years time would be his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other stuff might've seen more minor in comparison, whereas it's the mock epic that we're remembering him for, which again is perhaps another symptom of our sort of post romantic perspective.Henry: I think this is why Spenser suffers as well, because everything in Spenser is magical. The knights are fairies, not the little fairies that live in buttercups, but big human sized fairies or even bigger than that. And there are magical women and saucers and the whole thing is a sort of hodgepodge of romance and fairy tale and legend and all this stuff. And it's often said, oh, he was old fashioned in his own time. But those things still had a lot of currency in the 16th century. And a lot of those things are in Shakespeare, for example.But to us, that's like a fantasy novel. Now, I love fantasy and I read fantasy, and I think some of it's a very high accomplishment, but to a lot of people, fantasy just means kind of trash. Why am I going to read something with fairies and a wizard? And I think a lot of people just see Spenser and they're like, what is this? This is so weird. They don't realise how Protestant they're being, but they're like, this is so weird.James: And Pope has a little, I mean, the Rape of the Lock even has a little of the same because the rape of the lock has this attendant army of good spirits called selfs and evil spirits called gnomes. I mean, I find that just totally funny and charming. I really love it.Henry: I'm going to read, there's an extract from the Rape of the Lock in the Oxford Book, and I'm going to read a few lines to give people an idea of how he can be at once mocking something but also quite charming about it. It's quite a difficult line to draw. The Rape of the Lock is all about a scandalous incident where a young man took a lock of a lady's hair. Rape doesn't mean what we think it means. It means an offence. And so because he stole a lock of her hair, it'd become obviously this huge problem and everyone's in a flurry. And to sort of calm everyone down, Pope took it so seriously that he made it into a tremendous joke. So here he is describing the sort of dressing table if you like.And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,Each silver Vase in mystic order laid.First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores,With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs.A heav'nly image in the glass appears,To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.What a way to describe someone putting on their makeup. It's fantastic.James: It's funny. I can continue that because the little passage of Pope I picked to read begins exactly where yours ended. It only gets better as it goes on, I think. So after trembling begins the sacred rites of pride, Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and hereThe various off'rings of the world appear;From each she nicely culls with curious toil,And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.It's just so lovely. I love a thing about the tortoise and the elephant unite because you've got a tortoise shell and an ivory comb. And the stuff about India's glowing gems and Arabia breathing from yonder box, I mean that's a, realistic is not quite the word, but that's a reference to Milton because Milton is continually having all the stones of Arabia and India's pearls and things all screwed through paradise lost. Yeah, it's just so lovely, isn't it?Henry: And for someone who's so classical and composed and elegant, there's something very Dickensian about things like the toilet, the tortoise and the elephant here unite, transform to combs. There's something a little bit surreal and the puffs, powders, patches, bibles, it has that sort of slightly hectic, frantic,James: That's sort of Victorian materialism, wealth of material objects,Henry: But also that famous thing that was said of Dickens, that the people are furniture and the furniture's like people. He can bring to life all the little bits and bobs of the ordinary day and turn it into something not quite ridiculous, not quite charming.James: And there is a kind of charm in the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing that poets would necessarily expect to pay attention to the 18th century. I don't think the sort of powders and ointments on a woman's dressing table. And there's something very sort of charming in his condescension to notice or what might've once seemed his condescension to notice those things, to find a new thing to take seriously, which is what poetry or not quite to take seriously, but to pay attention to, which I guess is one of the things that great perch should always be doing.Henry: When Swift, who was Pope's great friend, wrote about this, he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Lady Going to Bed, which is not as good, and I would love to claim Swift on our list, but I really can't.James: It's quite a horrible perm as well, that one, isn't it?Henry: It is. But it shows you how other people would treat the idea of the woman in front of her toilet, her mirror. And Swift uses an opportunity, as he said, to “lash the vice” because he hated all this adornment and what he would think of as the fakery of a woman painting herself. And so he talks about Corina pride of Drury Lane, which is obviously an ironic reference to her being a Lady of the Night, coming back and there's no drunken rake with her. Returning at the midnight hour;Four stories climbing to her bow'r;Then, seated on a three-legged chair,Takes off her artificial hair:Now, picking out a crystal eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her eye-brows from a mouse's hide,Stuck on with art on either side,Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.Now dexterously her plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow jaws.And it goes on like this. I mean, line after this is sort of raw doll quality to it, Pope, I think in contrast, it only illuminates him more to see where others are taking this kind of crude, very, very funny and witty, but very crude approach. He's able to really have the classical art of balance.James: Yes. And it's precisely his charm that he can mock it and sympathise and love it at the same time, which I think is just a more sort of complex suite of poetic emotions to have about that thing.Henry: So we want more people to read Pope and to love Pope.James: Yes. Even if I'm not letting him into my top.Henry: You are locking him out of the garden. Now, for the second tier, I want to argue for two anonymous poets. One of the things we did when we were talking about this was we asked chatGPT to see if it could give us a good answer. And if you use o1 or o1 Pro, it gives you a pretty good answer as to who the best poets in English are. But it has to be told that it's forgotten about the anonymous poets. And then it says, oh, that was stupid. There are quite a lot of good anonymous poets in English, but I suspect a lot of us, a lot of non artificial intelligence when thinking about this question overlook the anonymous poets. But I would think the Gawain poet and the Tom O' Bedlam poet deserve to be in here. I don't know what you think about that.James: I'm not competent to provide an opinion. I'm purely here to be educated on the subject of these anonymous poets. Henry: The Gawain poet, he's a mediaeval, assume it's a he, a mediaeval writer, obviously may well not be a man, a mediaeval writer. And he wrote Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, which is, if you haven't read it, you should really read it in translation first, I think because it's written at the same time as Chaucer. But Chaucer was written in a kind of London dialect, which is what became the English we speak. And so you can read quite a lot of Chaucer and the words look pretty similar and sometimes you need the footnotes, but when you read Gawain and The Green Knight, it's in a Northwestern dialect, which very much did not become modern day English. And so it's a bit more baffling, but it is a poem of tremendous imaginative power and weirdness. It's a very compelling story. We have a children's version here written by Selena Hastings who's a very accomplished biographer. And every now and then my son remembers it and he just reads it again and again and again. It's one of the best tales of King Arthur in his knights. And there's a wonderful book by John Burrow. It's a very short book, but that is such a loving piece of criticism that explicates the way in which that poem promotes virtue and all the nightly goodness that you would expect, but also is a very strange and unreal piece of work. And I think it has all the qualities of great poetry, but because it's written in this weird dialect, I remember as an undergraduate thinking, why is this so bloody difficult to read? But it is just marvellous. And I see people on Twitter, the few people who've read it, they read it again and they just say, God, it's so good. And I think there was a film of it a couple of years ago, but we will gloss lightly over that and not encourage you to do the film instead of the book.James: Yeah, you're now triggering a memory that I was at least set to read and perhaps did at least read part of Gawain and the Green Knight at University, but has not stuck to any brain cells at all.Henry: Well, you must try it again and tell me what you think. I mean, I find it easily to be one of the best poems in English.James: Yeah, no, I should. I had a little Chaucer kick recently actually, so maybe I'm prepared to rediscover mediaeval per after years of neglect since my degree,Henry: And it's quite short, which I always think is worth knowing. And then the Tom Bedlam is an anonymous poem from I think the 17th century, and it's one of the mad songs, so it's a bit like the Fool from King Lear. And again, it is a very mysterious, very strange and weird piece of work. Try and find it in and read the first few lines. And I think because it's anonymous, it's got slightly less of a reputation because it can't get picked up with some big name, but it is full of tremendous power. And again, I think it would be sad if it wasn't more well known.From the hag and hungry goblinThat into rags would rend ye,The spirit that stands by the naked manIn the Book of Moons defend ye,That of your five sound sensesYou never be forsaken,Nor wander from your selves with TomAbroad to beg your bacon,While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,Feeding, drink, or clothing;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,Poor Tom will injure nothing.Anyway, so you get the sense of it and it's got many stanzas and it's full of this kind of energy and it's again, very accomplished. It can carry the thought across these long lines and these long stanzas.James: When was it written? I'm aware of only if there's a name in the back of my mind.Henry: Oh, it's from the 17th century. So it's not from such a different time as King Lear, but it's written in the voice of a madman. And again, you think of that as the sort of thing a romantic poet would do. And it's strange to find it almost strange to find it displaced. There were these other mad songs. But I think because it's anonymous, it gets less well known, it gets less attention. It's not part of a bigger body of work, but it's absolutely, I think it's wonderful.James: I shall read it.Henry: So who have you got? Who else? Who are you putting in instead of these two?James: Hang on. So we're down to tier two now.Henry: Tier two.James: Yeah. So my tier two is: Donne, Elliot, Keats, Tennyson. I've put Spenser in tier two, Marvell and Pope, who we've already discussed. I mean, I think Eliot, we've talked about, I mean Donne just speaks for himself and there's probably a case that some people would make to bump him up a tier. Henry: Anybody can read that case in Katherine Rudell's book. We don't need to…James: Yes, exactly. If anybody's punching perhaps in tier two, it's Tennyson who I wasn't totally sure belonged there. Putting Tenon in the same tier as Donne and Spenser and Keets. I wonder if that's a little ambitious. I think that might raise eyebrows because there is a school of thought, which I'm not totally unsympathetic to this. What's the Auden quote about Tennyson? I really like it. I expressed very harshly, but I sort of get what he means. Auden said that Tennyson “had the finest ear perhaps of any English poet who was also undoubtedly the stupidest. There was little that he didn't know. There was little else that he did.” Which is far too harsh. But I mentioned to you earlier that I think was earlier this year, a friend and I had a project where we were going to memorise a perva week was a plan. We ended up basically getting, I think three quarters of the way through.And if there's a criticism of Tennyson that you could make, it's that the word music and the sheer lushness of phrases sometimes becomes its own momentum. And you can end up with these extremely lovely but sometimes slightly empty beautiful phrases, which is what I ended up feeling about Tithonus. And I sort of slightly felt I was memorising this unbelievably beautiful but ever so slightly hollow thing. And that was slightly why the project fell apart, I should say. Of course, they absolutely love Tennyson. He's one of my all time favourite poets, which is why my personal favouritism has bumped him up into that category. But I can see there's a case, and I think to a lot of people, he's just the kind of Victorian establishment gloom man, which is totally unfair, but there's not no case against Tennyson.Henry: Yeah, the common thing is that he has no ideas. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm also, I'm not sure how desperately important it is. It should be possible to be a great poet without ideas being at the centre of your work. If you accept the idea that the essence of poetry is invention, i.e. to say old things in a fantastically new way, then I think he qualifies very well as a great poet.James: Yes..Henry: Well, very well. I think Auden said what he said because he was anxious that it was true of himself.James: Yeah, I mean there's a strong argument that Auden had far too many ideas and the sorts of mad schemes and fantastical theories about history that Auden spent his spare time chasing after is certainly a kind of argument that poets maybe shouldn't have as many ideas, although it's just reading. Seamus Perry's got a very good little book on Tennyson, and the opening chapter is all about arguments about people who have tended to dislike Tennyson. And there are all kinds of embarrassing anecdotes about the elderly Tennyson trying to sort of go around dinner parties saying profound and sage-like things and totally putting his foot in it and saying things are completely banal. I should have made a note that this was sort of slightly, again, intensifying my alarm about is there occasionally a tinsely hollowness about Tennyson. I'm now being way too harsh about one of my favourite poets—Henry: I think it depends what you mean by ideas. He is more than just a poet of moods. He gives great expression, deep and strongly felt expression to a whole way of being and a whole way of conceiving of things. And it really was a huge part of why people became interested in the middle ages in the 19th century. I think there's Walter Scott and there's Tennyson who are really leading that work, and that became a dominant cultural force and it became something that meant a lot to people. And whether or not, I don't know whether it's the sort of idea that we're talking about, but I think that sort of thing, I think that qualifies as having ideas and think again, I think he's one of the best writers about the Arthurian legend. Now that work doesn't get into the Oxford Book of English Verse, maybe that's fair. But I think it was very important and I love it. I love it. And I find Tennyson easy to memorise, which is another point in his favour.James: Yeah.Henry: I'm going to read a little bit of Ulysses, which everyone knows the last five or six lines of that poem because it gets put into James Bond films and other such things. I'm going to read it from a little bit from earlier on. I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.I think that's amazing. And he can do that. He can do lots and lots and lots of that.James: Yeah, he really can. It's stunning. “Far on the ringing planes of windy Troy” is such an unbelievably evocative phrase.Henry: And that's what I mean. He's got this ability to bring back a sort of a whole mood of history. It's not just personal mood poetry. He can take you into these places and that is in the space of a line. In the space of a line. I think Matthew Arnold said of the last bit of what I just read is that he had this ability in Ulysses to make the lines seem very long and slow and to give them this kind of epic quality that far goes far beyond the actual length of that poem. Ulysses feels like this huge poem that's capturing so much of Homer and it's a few dozen lines.James: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can I read a little bit of slightly more domestic Tennyson, from In Memoriam, I think his best poem and one of my all time favourite poems and it's got, there are many sort of famous lines on grief and things, but there's little sort of passage of natural description I think quite near the beginning that I've always really loved and I've always just thought was a stunning piece of poetry in terms of its sound and the way that the sound has patented and an unbelievably attentive description natural world, which is kind of the reason that even though I think Keats is a better poet, I do prefer reading Tennyson to Keats, so this is from the beginning of In Memoriam. Calm is the morn without a sound,Calm as to suit a calmer grief,And only thro' the faded leafThe chesnut pattering to the ground:Calm and deep peace on this high wold,And on these dews that drench the furze,And all the silvery gossamersThat twinkle into green and gold:Calm and still light on yon great plainThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,And crowded farms and lessening towers,To mingle with the bounding main:And I just think that's an amazing piece of writing that takes you from that very close up image that it begins with of the “chestnut patterning to the ground” through the faded leaves of the tree, which is again, a really attentive little bit of natural description. I think anyone can picture the way that a chestnut might fall through the leaves of a chestnut tree, and it's just an amazing thing to notice. And I think the chestnut pattern to the ground does all the kind of wonderful, slightly onomatopoeic, Tennyson stuff so well, but by the end, you're kind of looking out over the English countryside, you've seen dew on the firs, and then you're just looking out across the plane to the sea, and it's this sort of, I just think it's one of those bits of poetry that anybody who stood in a slightly wet and romantic day in the English countryside knows exactly the feeling that he's evoking. And I mean there's no bit of—all of In Memoriam is pretty much that good. That's not a particularly celebrated passage I don't think. It's just wonderful everywhere.Henry: Yes. In Memoriam a bit like the Dunciad—under appreciated relative to its huge merits.James: Yeah, I think it sounds, I mean guess by the end of his life, Tennyson had that reputation as the establishment sage of Victorian England, queen of Victoria's favourite poet, which is a pretty off-putting reputation for to have. And I think In Memoriam is supposed to be this slightly cobwebby, musty masterpiece of Victorian grief. But there was just so much, I mean, gorgeous, beautiful sensuous poetry in it.Henry: Yeah, lots of very intense feelings. No, I agree. I have Tennyson my third tier because I had to have the Gawain poet, but I agree that he's very, very great.James: Yeah, I think the case for third tier is I'm very open to that case for the reasons that I said.Henry: Keats, we both have Keats much higher than Shelly. I think Byron's not on anyone's list because who cares about Byron. Overrated, badly behaved. Terrible jokes. Terrible jokes.James: I think people often think Byron's a better pert without having read an awful lot of the poetry of Byron. But I think anybody who's tried to wade through long swathes of Don Juan or—Henry: My God,James: Childe Harold, has amazing, amazing, beautiful moments. But yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff that you don't enjoy. I think.Henry: So to make the case for Keats, I want to talk about The Eve of St. Agnes, which I don't know about you, but I love The Eve of St. Agnes. I go back to it all the time. I find it absolutely electric.James: I'm going to say that Keats is a poet, which is kind of weird for somebody is sent to us and obviously beautiful as Keats. I sort of feel like I admire more than I love. I get why he's brilliant. It's very hard not to see why he's brilliant, but he's someone I would very rarely sit down and read for fun and somebody got an awful lot of feeling or excitement out of, but that's clearly a me problem, not a Keats problem.Henry: When I was a teenager, I knew so much Keats by heart. I knew the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, I was absolutely steeped in it morning, noon and night. I couldn't get over it. And now I don't know if I could get back to that point. He was a very young poet and he writes in a very young way. But I'm going to read—The Eve of St. Agnes is great. It's a narrative poem, which I think is a good way to get into this stuff because the story is fantastic. And he had read Spenser, he was part of this kind of the beginning of this mediaeval revival. And he's very interested in going back to those old images, those old stories. And this is the bit, I think everything we're reading is from the Oxford Book of English Verse, so that if people at home want to read along they can.This is when the heroine of the poem is Madeline is making her escape basically. And I think this is very, very exciting. Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,Old Angela was feeling for the stair,When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:With silver taper's light, and pious care,She turn'd, and down the aged gossip ledTo a safe level matting. Now prepare,Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.Out went the taper as she hurried in;Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:She clos'd the door, she panted, all akinTo spirits of the air, and visions wide:No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!But to her heart, her heart was voluble,Paining with eloquence her balmy side;As though a tongueless nightingale should swellHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,All garlanded with carven imag'riesOf fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,And diamonded with panes of quaint device,Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.I mean, so much atmosphere, so much tension, so many wonderful images just coming one after the other. The rapidity of it, the tumbling nature of it. And people often quote the Ode to autumn, which has a lot of that.James: I have to say, I found that totally enchanting. And perhaps my problem is that I need you to read it all to me. You can make an audio book that I can listen to.Henry: I honestly, I actually might read the whole of the E and put it out as audio on Substack becauseJames: I would actually listen to that.Henry: I love it so much. And I feel like it gets, when we talk about Keats, we talk about, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Bright Star and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and these are great, great poems and they're poems that we do at school Ode to a Nightingale because I think The Great Gatsby has a big debt to Ode to a Nightingale, doesn't it? And obviously everyone quotes the Ode to Autumn. I mean, as far as I can tell, the 1st of October every year is the whole world sharing the first stands of the Ode to Autumn.James: Yeah. He may be one of the people who suffers from over familiarity perhaps. And I think also because it sounds so much what poetry is supposed to sound like, because so much of our idea of poetry derives from Keats. Maybe that's something I've slightly need to get past a little bit.Henry: But if you can get into the complete works, there are many, the bit I just read is I think quite representative.James: I loved it. I thought it was completely beautiful and I would never have thought to ever, I probably can't have read that poem for years. I wouldn't have thought to read it. Since university, I don't thinkHenry: He's one of those people. All of my copies of him are sort of frayed and the spines are breaking, but the book is wearing out. I should just commit it to memory and be done. But somehow I love going back to it. So Keats is very high in my estimation, and we've both put him higher than Shelly and Coleridge.James: Yeah.Henry: Tell me why. Because those would typically, I think, be considered the superior poets.James: Do you think Shelly? I think Keats would be considered the superior poetHenry: To Shelly?James: Certainly, yes. I think to Shelly and Coleridge, that's where current fashion would place them. I mean, I have to say Coleridge is one of my all time favourite poets. In terms of people who had just every so often think, I'd love to read a poem, I'd love to read Frost at Midnight. I'd love to read the Aeolian Harp. I'd love to read This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. I'd love to read Kubla Khan. Outside Milton, Coleridge is probably the person that I read most, but I think, I guess there's a case that Coleridge's output is pretty slight. What his reputation rest on is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poems, which a lot of people think are kind of plagiarised Wordsworth, at least in their style and tone, and then maybe not much else. Does anybody particularly read Cristabel and get much out of it nowadays? Dejection an Ode people like: it's never done an awful lot for me, so I sort of, in my personal Pantheon Coleridge is at the top and he's such an immensely sympathetic personality as well and such a curious person. But I think he's a little slight, and there's probably nothing in Coleridge that can match that gorgeous passage of Keats that you read. I think.Henry: Yeah, that's probably true. He's got more ideas, I guess. I don't think it matters that he's slight. Robert Frost said something about his ambition had been to lodge five or six poems in the English language, and if he'd done that, he would've achieved greatness. And obviously Frost very much did do that and is probably the most quotable and well-known poet. But I think Coleridge easily meets those criteria with the poems you described. And if all we had was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I would think it to be like Tom O' Bedlam, like the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one of those great, great, great poems that on its own terms, deserves to be on this list.James: Yeah, and I guess another point in his favour is a great poet is they're all pretty unalike. I think if given Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a conversation poem and Kubla Khan and said, guess whether these are three separate poets or the same guy, you would say, oh, there's a totally different poems. They're three different people. One's a kind of creepy gothic horror ballad. Another one is a philosophical reflection. Another is the sort of Mad Opium dream. I mean, Kubla Khan is just without a doubt, one of the top handful of purposes in English language, I think.Henry: Oh yeah, yeah. And it has that quality of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard that so many of the lines are so quotable in the sense that they could be, in the case of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a lot of novels did get their titles from it. I think it was James Lees Milne. Every volume of his diaries, which there are obviously quite a few, had its title from Kubla Khan. Ancient as the Hills and so on. It's one of those poems. It just provides us with so much wonderful language in the space of what a page.James: Sort of goes all over the place. Romantic chasms, Abyssinian made with dulcimer, icy pleasure dome with caves of ice. It just such a—it's so mysterious. I mean, there's nothing else remotely like it at all in English literature that I can think of, and its kind strangeness and virtuosity. I really love that poem.Henry: Now, should we say a word for Shelly? Because everyone knows Ozymandias, which is one of those internet poems that goes around a lot, but I don't know how well known the rest of his body of work is beyond that. I fell in love with him when I read a very short lyric called “To—” Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.I found that to be one of those poems that was once read and immediately memorised. But he has this very, again, broad body of work. He can write about philosophical ideas, he can write about moods, he can write narrative. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which is a dialogue poem about visiting a madman and taking sympathy with him and asking the question, who's really mad here? Very Swiftian question. He can write about the sublime in Mont Blanc. I mean, he has got huge intellectual power along with the beauty. He's what people want Tennyson to be, I guess.James: Yeah. Or what people think Byron might be. I think Shelly is great. I don't quite get that Byron is so much more famous. Shelly has just a dramatic and, well, maybe not quite just as, but an incredibly dramatic and exciting life to go along with it,Henry: I think some of the short lyrics from Byron have got much more purchase in day-to-day life, like She Walks in Beauty.James: Yeah. I think you have to maybe get Shelly a little more length, don't you? I mean, even there's something like Ode to the West Wind is you have to take the whole thing to love it, perhaps.Henry: Yes. And again, I think he's a bit like George Herbert. He's always thinking you really have to pay attention and think with him. Whereas Byron has got lots of lines you can copy out and give to a girl that you like on the bus or something.James: Yes. No, that's true.Henry: I don't mean that in quite as rude a way as it sounds. I do think that's a good thing. But Shelly's, I think, much more of a thinker, and I agree with you Childe Harold and so forth. It's all crashing bore. I might to try it again, but awful.James: I don't want move past Coledridge without inflicting little Coledridge on you. Can I?Henry: Oh, yes. No, sorry. We didn't read Coledridge, right?James: Are just, I mean, what to read from Coledridge? I mean, I could read the whole of Kubla Khan, but that would be maybe a bit boring. I mean, again, these are pretty famous and obvious lines from Frost at Midnight, which is Coledridge sitting up late at night in his cottage with his baby in its cradle, and he sort of addressing it and thinking about it. And I just think these lines are so, well, everything we've said about Coledridge, philosophical, thoughtful, beautiful, in a sort of totally knockout, undeniable way. So it goes, he's talking to his young son, I think. My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Which is just—what aren't those lines of poetry doing? And with such kind of confidence, the way you get from talking to your baby and its cradle about what kind of upbringing you hope it will have to those flashes of, I mean quite Wordsworthian beauty, and then the sort of philosophical tone at the end. It's just such a stunning, lovely poem. Yeah, I love it.Henry: Now we both got Yeats and Hopkins. And Hopkins I think is really, really a tremendous poet, but neither of us has put Browning, which a lot of other people maybe would. Can we have a go at Browning for a minute? Can we leave him in shreds? James: Oh God. I mean, you're going to be a better advocate of Browning than I am. I've never—Henry: Don't advocate for him. No, no, no.James: We we're sticking him out.Henry: We're sticking him.James: I wonder if I even feel qualified to do that. I mean, I read quite a bit of Browning at university, found it hard to get on with sometimes. I think I found a little affected and pretentious about him and a little kind of needlessly difficult in a sort of off-puttingly Victorian way. But then I was reading, I reviewed a couple of years ago, John Carey has an excellent introduction to English poetry. I think it's called A Little History of Poetry in which he described Browning's incredibly long poem, The Ring in the Book as one of the all time wonders of verbal art. This thing is, I think it's like 700 or 800 pages long poem in the Penguin edition, which has always given me pause for thought and made me think that I've dismissed Browning out of hand because if John Carey's telling me that, then I must be wrong.But I think I have had very little pleasure out of Browning, and I mean by the end of the 19th century, there was a bit of a sort of Victorian cult of Browning, which I think was influential. And people liked him because he was a living celebrity who'd been anointed as a great poet, and people liked to go and worship at his feet and stuff. I do kind of wonder whether he's lasted, I don't think many people read him for pleasure, and I wonder if that maybe tells its own story. What's your case against Browning?Henry: No, much the same. I think he's very accomplished and very, he probably, he deserves a place on the list, but I can't enjoy him and I don't really know why. But to me, he's very clever and very good, but as you say, a bit dull.James: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm willing. It must be our failing, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm willing to believe they're all, if this podcast is listened to by scholars of Victorian poetry, they're cringing and holding their head in their hands at this—Henry: They've turned off already. Well, if you read The Ring and the Book, you can come back on and tell us about it.James: Oh God, yeah. I mean, in about 20 years time.Henry: I think we both have Auden, but you said something you said, “does Auden have an edge of fraudulence?”James: Yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I'm being really rude about a lot of poets that I really love. I don't really know why doesn't think, realising that people consider to be a little bit weak makes you appreciate their best stuff even more I guess. I mean, it's hard to make that argument without reading a bit of Auden. I wonder what bit gets it across. I haven't gotten any ready. What would you say about Auden?Henry: I love Auden. I think he was the best poet of the 20th century maybe. I mean, I have to sort of begrudgingly accept T.S. Eliot beside, I think he can do everything from, he can do songs, light lyrics, comic verse, he can do occasional poetry, obituaries. He was a political poet. He wrote in every form, I think almost literally that might be true. Every type of stanza, different lines. He was just structurally remarkable. I suspect he'll end up a bit like Pope once the culture has tur

I. Abraham's reasoning faith (review), vv17-19. II. Isaac's defective faith, v20. III. Jacob's responsive faith, v21. IV. Joseph's instructive faith, v22. 

To reconcile offending man,  Make Justice drop her angry rod;  What creature could have formed the plan,  Or who fulfill it but a God?  No drop remains of all the curse,  For wretches who deserved the whole;  No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce  The guilty, but returning soul.  Peace by such means so dearly bought,  What rebel could have hoped to see?  Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought,  His Sovereign fastened to a tree. – William Cowper 

William Cowper's life was marked by deep sorrow, mental illness, and overwhelming despair, yet it was also filled with moments of profound faith, divine deliverance, and beautiful expressions of God's grace. Born in 1731, Cowper was a gifted poet whose hymns continue to touch hearts and point people to the gospel. His life's trajectory was profoundly shaped by personal struggles with depression, as well as by the intervention of friends like John Newton, who guided him through dark times. It was Romans 3:24 that transformed Cowper's heart as he sat in an asylum, broken and lost. Reading about the propitiation of Christ—how Jesus bore the wrath of God on our behalf—Cowper realized the depth of God's grace for sinners like him. The poet who struggled with self-doubt and mental anguish penned some of the most powerful hymns in Christian history, including "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" and "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." In this episode, we explore how Cowper's life illustrates that God's grace shines brightest in the midst of personal weakness. His story reminds us that even when we struggle with despair, God is faithful to guide us through and use us for His glory. You'll be encouraged by the reminder that God works through every circumstance, weaving together a testimony of His grace, just as He did in William Cowper's life. Scripture Reading: Romans 3:25

William Cowper's life was marked by deep sorrow, mental illness, and overwhelming despair, yet it was also filled with moments of profound faith, divine deliverance, and beautiful expressions of God's grace. Born in 1731, Cowper was a gifted poet whose hymns continue to touch hearts and point people to the gospel. His life's trajectory was profoundly shaped by personal struggles with depression, as well as by the intervention of friends like John Newton, who guided him through dark times. It was Romans 3:24 that transformed Cowper's heart as he sat in an asylum, broken and lost. Reading about the propitiation of Christ—how Jesus bore the wrath of God on our behalf—Cowper realized the depth of God's grace for sinners like him. The poet who struggled with self-doubt and mental anguish penned some of the most powerful hymns in Christian history, including "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" and "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." In this episode, we explore how Cowper's life illustrates that God's grace shines brightest in the midst of personal weakness. His story reminds us that even when we struggle with despair, God is faithful to guide us through and use us for His glory. You'll be encouraged by the reminder that God works through every circumstance, weaving together a testimony of His grace, just as He did in William Cowper's life. Scripture Reading: Romans 3:25

Dios permite que nuestra fe sea puesta a prueba y permite que los problemas se agolpen en nuestra vida. A veces parecen más de lo que podemos soportar, pero Cristo puede soportarlos. El primer paso para “dividir las aguas” es recordarnos con frecuencia que el Señor nos ha puesto en este lugar difícil o nos ha permitido estar allí por razones que quizás solo Él conoce. Dios tiene un propósito, y como dijo el himnista William Cowper (pronunciado Cooper): “Dios es su propio intérprete, y lo dejará claro”.

Voices In My Head (the Rick Lee James Podcast) Episode 553: Kenny & Claire   Pointing listeners to the Hope of Christ amidst life's troubles, critically acclaimed husband/wife folk duo Kenny & Claire are set to bow their full-length debut, Upon the Storm, July 19. Produced by GRAMMY Award-winner Mitch Dane (Brandon Heath, JJ Heller), the 12-track set showcases four freshly penned originals and eight modern renditions of enduring hymns.    The album's title-cut, a stirring take on William Cowper's 18th century hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” features updated verses and a new arrangement by Kenny & Claireand Mitch Dane. "God Moves (Upon the Storm)" carries deep meaning for the couple following Kenny's struggle with a brain tumor as well as a life-altering chronic illness diagnosis. Hallmarked by thoughtful, organic arrangements firmly anchored in a folk/Americana soundscape, Upon the Storm also offers Kenny & Claire's signature take on such classic hymns as “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and “Come Thou Fount,” among others, along with a uniquely emotive rendition of the popular Keith Getty and Stuart Townend-penned hymn, “In Christ Alone.” New selections including “Surely His Goodness,” “Have Mercy on Us” and “We Believe”—all written by Kenny & Claire and Mitch Dane—bridge the past and present with thematic consistency.    ABOUT KENNY & CLAIRE Beginning their musical journey together in 2005—writing songs, performing and leading worship throughout the Carolinas—Kenny & Claire Hilliard were married in 2008 but paused their creative pursuits while Kenny attended seminary and the couple started a family. In 2015, during Kenny's tenure as a senior pastor and worship leader in Asheville, North Carolina, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Shortly after successful surgery to remove the tumor, Kenny received a second diagnosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—a degenerative genetic disease that left him temporarily impaired. The couple embraced a return to music during Kenny's recovery, founding a music teaching studio and further honing their songwriting craft by penning modern hymns for their home congregation.      Known for their emotive acoustic/folk originals and organic revivals of theologically rich hymns of yesteryear, Kenny & Claire's critically acclaimed debut EP, Are You Weary, released in 2021. In addition to participating in Getty Music's prestigious International Hymn Writing Collective, the couple's music has been highlighted by Under The Radar (UTR) and in The Rabbit Room's New Music Roundup, and Claire was also named among “Ones to Watch” by the Nashville Songwriters Association (NSAI) in 2021. Kenny & Clairenow reside in the Nashville area with their three children, and they maintain an active touring ministry, leading worship and performing in numerous churches around the country each year.            For further information or to request an interview with Kenny & Claire:  Brian Smith  •  brian@turningpointpr.com Emily Kohl  •  emily@turningpointpr.com   ----more---- Contact Rick Lee James Email: Rick@RickLeeJames.com Get the new song - Whatever You Do Up on the Mountain Also, Don't forget to swing by Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or your favorite streaming platform and hit those follow buttons! By hitting the follow button, you'll stay updated on my latest releases and show your support for my music! I can't wait to meet you Up on the Mountain on July 12th. Blessings, Rick Lee James         ----more----   10% Off Everything Rick Lee James on Band camp Instructions Visit https://rickleejames.bandcamp.com At checkout use code: 10off Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing) This song appeared on over 80 Spotify playlists this Advent Season. I want to thank everyone for listening and sharing it this year.   Official Music Video:   Web Site: https://rickleejames.com   PURCHASE ALBUM: www.RickLeeJames.Bandcamp.com SongSelect: https://songselect.ccli.com/Songs/6152291/advent-hymn-watching-waiting-longing Downloadable Charts and More available from LIFEWAYWORSHIP.COM: https://worship.lifeway.com/findAndBuy/songPage/AdventHymn(Watching%2CWaiting%2CLonging)?versionId=93901&rowNum=0&searchString=Advent%20Hymn%20(watching,%20Waiting,%20Longing)#song-Parts Loop Community: https://loopcommunity.com/en-us/songs/advent-hymn-(watching%2C-waiting%2C-longing)-by-rick-lee-james-3892  Endorsements: “A perfect and needed addition to any Christmas playlist this year. Rick Lee James bringing home the Advent Message.” -CCM Magazine https://www.ccmmagazine.com/music-video/rick-lee-james-advent-hymn-watching-waiting-longing/ “I love Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing), which gives newness to the phrases of Isaiah. Watching, waiting, and longing is what we do now, and these songs help us do that in confidence. I anticipate that this album will be received as a great gift by many who will find their faith nourished and awakened by it.” –Walter Brueggemann (Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary) "I've watched Rick grow as an artist and songwriter for many years. Congratulations brother on an excellent independent release." -Paul Baloche (Dove Award Winning Songwriter) "Rick Lee James is a poet and singer. You will not only enjoy listening, you'll be drawn into the source –Jesus." -Mike Harland RICK LEE JAMES INFO Web Sites: https://www.rickleejames.com Get The Single: https://rickleejames.hearnow.com/halls         More from Rick Lee James Shine A Light In The Darkness Get The Single: https://rickleejames.hearnow.com/shine-a-light-in-the-darkness Music Video:   Rick Lee James Playlist on Spotify:   https://t.co/S7nCRl0xqa            

Voices In My Head (the Rick Lee James Podcast)Episode 553: Kenny & ClairePointing listeners to the Hope of Christ amidst life's troubles, critically acclaimed husband/wife folk duo Kenny & Claire are set to bow their full-length debut, Upon the Storm, July 19. Produced by GRAMMY Award-winner Mitch Dane (Brandon Heath, JJ Heller), the 12-track set showcases four freshly penned originals and eight modern renditions of enduring hymns.  The album's title-cut, a stirring take on William Cowper's 18th century hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” features updated verses and a new arrangement by Kenny & Claireand Mitch Dane. "God Moves (Upon the Storm)" carries deep meaning for the couple following Kenny's struggle with a brain tumor as well as a life-altering chronic illness diagnosis.Hallmarked by thoughtful, organic arrangements firmly anchored in a folk/Americana soundscape, Upon the Storm also offers Kenny & Claire's signature take on such classic hymns as “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and “Come Thou Fount,” among others, along with a uniquely emotive rendition of the popular Keith Getty and Stuart Townend-penned hymn, “In Christ Alone.” New selections including “Surely His Goodness,” “Have Mercy on Us” and “We Believe”—all written by Kenny & Claire and Mitch Dane—bridge the past and present with thematic consistency.  ABOUT KENNY & CLAIREBeginning their musical journey together in 2005—writing songs, performing and leading worship throughout the Carolinas—Kenny & Claire Hilliard were married in 2008 but paused their creative pursuits while Kenny attended seminary and the couple started a family. In 2015, during Kenny's tenure as a senior pastor and worship leader in Asheville, North Carolina, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Shortly after successful surgery to remove the tumor, Kenny received a second diagnosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—a degenerative genetic disease that left him temporarily impaired. The couple embraced a return to music during Kenny's recovery, founding a music teaching studio and further honing their songwriting craft by penning modern hymns for their home congregation.    Known for their emotive acoustic/folk originals and organic revivals of theologically rich hymns of yesteryear, Kenny & Claire's critically acclaimed debut EP, Are You Weary, released in 2021. In addition to participating in Getty Music's prestigious International Hymn Writing Collective, the couple's music has been highlighted by Under The Radar (UTR) and in The Rabbit Room's New Music Roundup, and Claire was also named among “Ones to Watch” by the Nashville Songwriters Association (NSAI) in 2021. Kenny & Clairenow reside in the Nashville area with their three children, and they maintain an active touring ministry, leading worship and performing in numerous churches around the country each year. For further information or to request an interview with Kenny & Claire: Brian Smith  •  brian@turningpointpr.comEmily Kohl  •  emily@turningpointpr.comContact Rick Lee JamesEmail: Rick@RickLeeJames.comVINYL SALETHUNDER by Rick Lee JamesONLY $9.99. (Plus you get a free digital download of the album)VINYL SALE -Thank you for listening!10% Off Everything Rick Lee James on Band campInstructions* Visit https://rickleejames.bandcamp.com* At checkout use code: 10off* Web Site:https://rickleejames.com* PURCHASE ALBUM: www.RickLeeJames.Bandcamp.com* SongSelect: https://songselect.ccli.com/Songs/6152291/advent-hymn-watching-waiting-longing* Downloadable Charts and More available from LIFEWAYWORSHIP.COM: https://worship.lifeway.com/findAndBuy/songPage/AdventHymn(Watching%2CWaiting%2CLonging)?versionId=93901&rowNum=0&searchString=Advent%20Hymn%20(watching,%20Waiting,%20Longing)#song-Parts* Loop Community: https://loopcommunity.com/en-us/songs/advent-hymn-(watching%2C-waiting%2C-longing)-by-rick-lee-james-3892 Endorsements:“A perfect and needed addition to any Christmas playlist this year. Rick Lee James bringing home the Advent Message.”-CCM Magazine https://www.ccmmagazine.com/music-video/rick-lee-james-advent-hymn-watching-waiting-longing/“I love Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing), which gives newness to the phrases of Isaiah. Watching, waiting, and longing is what we do now, and these songs help us do that in confidence. I anticipate that this album will be received as a great gift by many who will find their faith nourished and awakened by it.”–Walter Brueggemann (Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary)"I've watched Rick grow as an artist and songwriter for many years. Congratulations brother on an excellent independent release."-Paul Baloche (Dove Award Winning Songwriter)"Rick Lee James is a poet and singer. You will not only enjoy listening, you'll be drawn into the source –Jesus."-Mike HarlandRICK LEE JAMES INFOWeb Sites:https://www.rickleejames.comGet The Single:https://rickleejames.hearnow.com/halls More from Rick Lee JamesShine A Light In The DarknessGet The Single: https://rickleejames.hearnow.com/shine-a-light-in-the-darknessMusic Video:Rick Lee James Playlist on Spotify:https://t.co/S7nCRl0xqa This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rickleejames.substack.com/subscribe

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“My grand objection to the religious system still held by many who declare themselves orthodox Churchmen. . . is, that it tends to render Christianity so much a system of prohibitions rather than of privilege and hopes, and thus the injunction to rejoice, so strongly enforced in the New Testament, is practically neglected, and Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.”~William Wilberforce (1759-1833), social reformer credited with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire “I suddenly saw that someone could use all the language of…Christianity, and yet the center was fundamentally the self…. And God is auxiliary to that…. I also saw that quite a lot of…Christianity can easily slip, can become centered in me…, and not in the glory of God"~Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), British theologian “Whenever you…argue within yourself how God is to be found—a God that justifies and accepts sinners: then know that there is no other God beside this man Christ Jesus…. [W]hen any of us shall have to wrestle with the law, sin, and death, and all other evils, we must look upon no other God, but only this God incarnate and clothed with man's nature.”~Martin Luther (1483-1546) in his Galatians Commentary “…at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma…. It's clear to me it's at the very heart of the universe…. And yet along comes this thing called Grace…. Grace defies logic. Love interrupts…the consequences of your actions. ….I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sin onto the Cross….”~Bono of U2 fame “Thesis 26: The law says, ‘do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,' and everything is already done.”~Marin Luther in his Heidelberg Disputation (1518) “To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and hear His pardoning voice,Changes a slave into a child, and duty into choice.”~William Cowper (1731-1800), famed English poet in his “Love Constrained Obedience”SERMON PASSAGEGalatians 3:23-4:7 (ESV)Galatians 3 23 Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.Galatians 4 1 I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, 2 but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. 3 In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Listen along as we continue our journey through the hall of faith. Notes//Quotes: “Faith is not something passive, not something private, not an esoteric interest kept in a corner, brought down, as it were, to be put on display every so often, but actual biblical faith, a decisive decision, and a sustained attitude. Beginning as a man or a woman gives up all dependence upon himself or herself in order to trust in living God.” —Alistair Begg “You're only as durable as the thing you love most. If I love something most that can never pass away….I will never pass away. If I can love something most that will lasts forever…I will last forever. But if I love anything that's vulnerable…then I'm vulnerable.” —Timothy Keller 1. Every person is goal oriented. 2. All goals compete. You can't live unless you choose one goal as the center of value by which all other goals are judged. One bottom line. 3. “If you choose a finite center of value, you're always anxious.”  — Thomas Oden “It might have seemed strange, that Moses should set a few drops of blood, as a remedy, in opposition to God's vengeance; but being satisfied with God's word alone, that the people would be exempt from the scourge that was coming on the Egyptians, he did not hesitate.” —John Calvin 10 “When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they feared greatly. And the people of Israel cried out to the Lord. 11 They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:10-12) “You see, we don't have to worry about how he's gonna part the sea. We just have to worry about whether we're prepared to stand with the staff stretched out over the water. And some of us never have the joy of standing, as it were, and seeing the deliverance of God because we're so worried about how God is gonna manage to take care of it. God says, “Don't worry about that. I'll take care of it. You just do what I told you.” “By faith.” By faith! Nothing but persevering faith could enable Moses to do what he did, and then in turn the people to follow him as they did.”—Alistair Begg  1 God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.  2 Deep in unfathomable mines of never-failing skill; He treasures up His bright designs, and works His sov'reign will.  3 Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.  4 Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace; behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face. 5 His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour; the bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flow'r. 6 Blind unbelief is sure to err, and scan His work in vain; God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain. Source: Psalms and Hymns to the Living God #412 by William Cowper     

The Richard Syrett Show, July 5th, 2024 Canadian employers allegedly racist for not hiring activist troublemakers https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/slobodian-canadian-employers-allegedly-racist-for-not-hiring-activist-troublemakers/55768  Linda Slobodian is the Senior Manitoba Columnist for the Western Standard based out of Winnipeg.   Liars, Cheats and Crooks - New Single from Five Times August Watch video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yED2b-GGRKg Brad Skistimas, aka “Five Times August” is an accomplished singer/songwriter, and recording artist base in Dallas, Texas. His new single is called, Liars, Cheats and Crooks https://www.fivetimesaugust.com Five Times August - Stay Free Concert - St. Catharines, Ontario September 14th More details https://trinityproductions.ca THE LIMRIDDLER Mexican Salsa Trade that ignited a maritime quest. Beckham and Bunton were stardom possessed. Variety rife Is the essence of life. What gives a Mexican salsa its zest? THE UN TAKEOVER OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS  Maggie Hope Braun – Community Advocate, Speaker and Writer, the Founder of Gather 2030 and leads the KICLEI Initiative a project designed to help Canadians engage their municipalities, protect their community and strengthen citizen led democracy Get Involved! https://www.kiclei.ca https://gather2030.substack.com KEEPING AN EYE ON YOUR MONEY Taxpayers call on Ford to end LCBO monopoly https://www.taxpayer.com/newsroom/taxpayers-call-on-ford-to-end-lcbo-monopoly Jay Goldberg, Ontario Director of The Canadian Taxpayer Federation Petition to Fire Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gonkek Sign the Petition to Fire Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek https://www.rebelnews.com/tags/jyoti_gondek  Sydney Fizzard – Video Journalist for Rebel News THE LIMRIDDLE ANSWER AND WINNERS The answer to today's Limriddle is: Spice The first five to answer correctly were: 1. Will McNair, Ottawa, Ontario 2. Amy Lou Woo, Baysville, Ontario 3. Rosalind Mitchell, Peterborough, Ontario 4. Tom Dibblee, Lake of Bays, Ontario 5. Sue Somerville, Calgary, Alberta Trade that ignited a maritime quest. The spice trade involved early civilizations in Asian, Northeast Africa and Europe and included cinnamon, ginger, pepper nutmeg, cloves, turmeric and others. Beckham and Bunton were stardom possessed. The Spice Girls were a British music group formed in 1994 and included, among others, Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) and Emma Burton (Baby Spice). Variety rife Is the essence of life. “Variety is the spice of life.” This expression originated with William Cowper's poem, The Task (1785). What gives a Mexican salsa its zest? Salsa is a both dance and a dish. As a tomato sauce, salsa gets its zest from spices. As a Latin American dance, it exhibits considerable spice as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's episode, Dennis Jernigan shares the story behind the hymn, There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood, along with a short biography of the life of the hymn's composer, William Cowper. Dennis also couples his song, Who Can Satisfy My Soul, with that old hymn. This medley is from his recording, HYMNS I. That mp3 is available at https://dennisjernigan.com/store/product.php?c=24&p=2773 or on iTunes. You can join Dennis and the people of All In All Church for live-stream worship on the first Wednesday evening of each month. Just go to https://www.facebook.com/therealdennisjernigan at 7 PM CST. Mark it in your calendar. Worship with All in All Church - First Wednesday of each month. Daily Devotions for Kingdom Seekers, Vol. 3 is available at https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Devotions-Kingdom-Seekers-Vol-ebook/dp/B081K8TZLX Check out my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/DennisJernigan and read through the various tiers of support and discover the myriad of benefits you will receive based on the level of support you choose. If you're willing, go ahead and sign up!

In this episode, we consider William Cowper and his mental challenges.If you are having a mental health crisis, dial 911, or get to the nearest  Emergency Room, or call one of these numbers. This podcast does not give medical advice or diagnosis.Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services(SAMHSA) 1-800-662-HELP (4357)National Youth Crisis Hotline - 1-800-448-4663National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1-800-273-TALK988 - Lifeline Chat and Text741741 -     Crisis Text Line 

Caption:In this episode, John sits down with Pastor Brian Murphy to continue their previous discussion on depression. Today, they discuss the surprising gift of lament. What is lament and how is it a gift? What is God's invitation to those who are in the midst of suffering, grief or depression? How can you best help a loved one who is suffering? All this and more in today's episode!Books and resources mentioned in this episode:"Spurgeon's Sorrows", by Zack Eswine"A Small Cup of Light", by Ben Palpant"God Moves In A Mysterious Way", by William Cowper

"God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; he plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.Deep in unfathomable mines, of never-failing skill; he fashions up his bright designs, and works his sovereign will." William CowperI Samuel 9 is all about the unfathomable providence of God. Donkeys go missing, and Israel finds her King. In a series of disconnected, random and normal events, we will see through to the other side of the tapestry, and notice that they are connected, planned and miraculous.

In today's episode we offer you a profound understanding of why the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just a historical event, but the bedrock of our faith, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15. We pay tribute to the enduring legacy of William Cowper, delving into his classic hymn "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood," and uncovering the depths of its theological richness. We take a look at both Cowper's personal struggles, and the pastoral support and comfort he received from the Unwin family and Rev. John Newton. We learn a little about how the Cowper's words have had various music settings and get to hear various takes on the most popular tune used today. Reawaken Hymn's moving rendition of this hymn bring home the episode's message of hope and the enduring promise of the gospel.As we reflect on themes of atonement and the free gift of salvation, the life-changing impact of this sacred song becomes clear. Cowper's song  journeys from the somber reflection of Good Friday to the triumph of Easter Sunday.  We explore the vivid imagery of the dying thief and the infinite mercy of God, challenging us to live as "resurrection people," filled with the transformative power of Jesus' resurrection in our daily lives. This episode is not merely a listening experience but an invitation to embrace the boundless grace and redemption that define our lives and our worship. Join us and be inspired by the power of this phenomenal hymn to articulate our deepest desires for redemption and ignite a renewed sense of hope in the finished work of Jesus Christ.A huge thank you again to Doug Johnson for "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood" arranged and performed for solo violin.SHOW LINKS:"There is a Fountain" performed by Nathan Drake of Reawaken Hymns with chord charts and many other church music resources."There is a Fountain" appears on the album Hymns of the Son available here.Excerpt from Alistair Begg – “The Man on the Middle Cross Said I Could Come” "Let Me Sing" by Andrew Peterson from the Album Clear to Venus"There is a Fountain" by Tim Harvey and The Bethlehem Baptist Praise BandSupport the show www.thebrightforever.comAll songs used by permission.

Speaker 1:This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston, or donate to this ministry, please visit mosaicoston.com.Speaker 2:Heavenly Father, we're so thankful for the privilege and the blessing it is to gather. As Your people, we don't take this for granted. What a blessing it is to gather and experience Your presence and give You Your due glory. We worship You, Father, and we thank You that the only way that we were allowed back into the Father's house, into the Father's presence was because of the sacrifice of the Son.And Jesus, we thank You that You came and You lived a perfect life obedient to the Father, to the very last drop on the cross. And we thank You that You did that to provide a way, to provide a gateway into the Father's house. And we thank You that when we repent of sin, You do forgive us of our rebellion, of our hostility toward You, and we do acknowledge that that's real. In many ways, often we live as if You don't exist or as if You're not God over certain parts of our life where we just block that section out and live in indifference toward You and Your will. So we ask for forgiveness for that.We pray from the holy Scriptures today that You teach us, that You, Holy Spirit, minister to us in a way that only You can. And I pray, do point out those places of rebellion in our hearts and in our lives and give us the grace to submit ourselves holistically to You. Lord, bless our time with the holy Scriptures, and we pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.We're continuing our sermon series through the incredible Gospel of Mark, and the title of the sermon today is The Insanity of Killing God.A few years back, I remember reading about a famous child actor who upon growing up claimed that he had divorced his parents. He claimed to have divorced himself from his parents. He said the words and perhaps he even filed some of the official legal documents, but of course he could not divorce himself from the reality of the origin of life.As we meditate on Holy Week, the most important week in all of human history, we're given a front row to what happened to God when He became one of us. A few years ago, there was a famous song and there's a line that went, "What if God were one of us?" Well, He was and we killed him. And just imagine the insanity of doing this to really think that you can get rid of God. And you might not live in just complete outright vocal rebellion toward God, but you might live as if God is dead to you. Meaning the idea of God is so distant from your life, He might as well be dead to you. And aren't you doing the same thing as the Jews and the Romans? Aren't you attempting to kill God?But you can't kill God. He's eternal, of course. Jesus, when they tried to keep Him down, they couldn't. He came back from the dead. And that shouldn't be surprising knowing who Christ was. We should have all seen that one coming. What is surprising is that anybody would want to kill God. Why would you try to liquidate the one who gave you life? You literally bear His image. His image is printed upon you. You're His. You belong to Him.Why do we have this hostility in our hearts? Because we don't want to give up authority to govern our lives as we please. The stubborn grip on the throne of our lives leads to our self-destruction. Because you can't kill God, you can't get rid of the stubborn fact that God is, He always will be. And it would be wise of us to make peace with God while we still have a chance, while we're still alive, to accept His fatherly authority, to accept His love, to accept his provision and His protection, and to give Him His due, which is obedience of faith from the heart, to glorify Him, honor and worship Him.And if you meditate upon it, it is absolutely insane to rebel against God because you won't win. He always wins. He's God. And rebelling against God will always lead to self-destruction, but still there's a desire to rebel. Edgar Allan Poe, one of America's greatest writers who knew all about self-destruction intimately, he coined the phenomenon of willful self-destruction as, quote, perverseness.In one of his works, the Imp of the Perverse, Poe contends that just knowing something is wrong is the one unconquerable force that makes us do it. We all have an overwhelming tendency to do wrong for wrong's sake. We're all tempted by the forbidden fruit. And often, it's not the fruit itself that irresistibly draws us but the fact that it's forbidden. Don't do this is sometimes the only reason why we're tempted to do it. The forbidden is a powerful magnet pulling on our sinful hearts because deep inside, if we're honest, we absolutely despise someone telling us what to do, even if it is God, especially if it is God. And in our text today, Jesus reveals this innate suicidal enmity toward God and He graciously offers to save us, and He does it by allowing his own destruction, His own self-destruction, so to speak, to save us from our self-destruction. And thereby, He provides the means to replace, to plant that enmity toward God with love and obedience. Today, we're in Mark 12:1-17. Would you look at the text with me?"And He began to speak to them in parables. 'A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the wine press and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Again, he sent to them another servant and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them saying, "They will respect my son." But those tenants said to one another, "This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours." And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.' What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.Have you not read this Scripture? "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes."' And they were seeking to arrest Him but feared the people for they perceived that He had told the parable against them. So they left Him and went away. And they sent to Him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians to trap Him in his talk. And they came and said to Him, 'Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or should we not?' But knowing their hypocrisy, He said to them, 'Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.' And they brought one and He said to them, 'Whose likeness and inscription is this?' They said to Him, 'Caesar's.' Jesus said to them, 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.' And they marveled at him."This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. First, our three points to frame over our time. First, suicidal enmity toward the Father. Second, suicidal enmity toward the messengers. And third, suicidal enmity toward the Son.First, suicidal enmity toward the Father. After Jesus had entered Jerusalem on Passover week, Holy Week, and He entered by receiving the worship from the people, they cried out, "Hosanna, God save us." He received their acclamations and did not reject them. And by doing so, He's throwing down the gauntlet. The time has come for Him to do a face-off with the spiritual authorities of the day. And after deflecting the religious leader's hostile challenge to His authority in the previous text, Jesus tells a parable here, and it's a powerful parable. And a lot of people think parables are just stories. They're not. Parables are used as verbal weapons. And here, Jesus Christ is leveling a wrecking ball of a parable. And what are they weapons against? Against the people, not the people themselves, but the ideas that they are promulgating, the ideas that they represent.And what are the ideas that Jesus is wrecking here with His words? They're ideas of authority. He's demolishing their man-made authority structures which put them higher than God. And this, friends, of course is very highly relevant because this is every single person's problem. We put human authority above God's authority, and no one is higher than God and no one is higher in authority than God the Father. Read Matthew 23 this week as you prepare for Good Friday. Matthew 23 is the sermon that got Jesus crucified. He was murdered because of His words. That's how powerful of a wrecking ball they were. Jesus' sermon, Matthew 23, destroys all of the authority structures of Israel of that day. And in Matthew 23:8-9, Jesus says this, "But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth for you have one Father who is in heaven."Now, anyone listening at that time was incredibly offended by these words. In one sentence, Jesus dismantles the Jewish system of authority showing them no, a rabbi is not higher than God himself. God's word and not human tradition is preeminent in authority. And then He says don't call anyone father in one fell swoop. He is dismantling the system of authority in the Catholic Church that has a man at the very top of the system of authority. Jesus says don't call anyone father. And I've always found it confusing that Catholics call priests father but don't let them ever become a father. That's all confusing and Jesus knocks all that down.How did Jesus teach us to pray to the Father? Our Father. Jesus didn't pray to Jesus. Jesus prayed to the Father. And this is important that when you do pray, pray to God the Father because it reminds us who's in charge. It reminds us who has ultimate authority over us. He created us, He cultivates us, He protects us, and He owns us.Mark 12:1, "Jesus began to speak to them in parables. 'A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the wine press and built a tower and leased it to tenants and went into another country.'" We're not told how the man got the capital that was needed to buy the land and buy the equipment, the infrastructure, et cetera. Most likely this is a man that had to work for years, maybe a decade plus, to accumulate the capital, and he takes on risk and he works really hard and he does this in order to reap a harvest from his work.And the main purpose of verse 1 isn't just to elaborate details of the allegory, et cetera. The details here are to show that this is all done in love. This is a man who worked hard with the land, with his hands, with what the Lord has given him to create something beautiful. And what's the fence for? The fence is to protect what this man has lovingly created. He of course here represents God the Father. Later on in the text, we know that he sends a son. Therefore, he is a father. The man represents God the Father, and the Father is a creator, he's a cultivator, and he's a protector. The fence was there to protect from external threats, but it turned out that the threats were internal.And this is a good reminder of every father's job. If you've been given the blessing of being a father, your job is to create, to cultivate, and to protect. Protect the child from threats, external and internal. We are to teach our children about sin within and we are to protect. We are teach them about the sinful flesh that is hostile toward God, and we are to teach them that there are consequences for sin. Yes, God does give grace, He does forgive, but we want to prevent you from the consequences of sin. And we are to teach them about grace and teach them how to flee sin and pursue righteousness because living righteously delights God the Father's heart. And when God is delighted, He delights to bless.The imagery and the details used in this text are taken from Isaiah 5 where the vineyard stands for Israel and the man for God. An ancient Jewish and Christian texts interpret the tower and the wine vat in Isaiah 5 as the temple and its altar and defense may stand for the walls of Jerusalem. Would you look at Isaiah 5:1-7 with me? "Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines. He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it. And he looked forward it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, oh, inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I looked forward to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?And now I will tell you what I will do in my vineyard. I will remove its hedge and it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste. It shall not be pruned or hoed and briars and thorns shall grow up. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting. And he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed for righteousness, but behold, an outcry."So God is saying He's entrusted His people, the people of Israel, with His law, with His prophets, with His temple, with His priests and with land. And the expectation was that they would bear fruit for the Lord. The religious leaders were expected to govern Israel by God's Word, and the people were to be self-governed by God's Word. That didn't happen. So this man that planted this vineyard built the walls around it. He leases it out to tenants. They draft a lease with clear expectations, a clear payment for the rent, for leasing the land, and then the man went into another country.The application for all of us, the broader application is very clear. What this parable is telling us is that we are not our own. That we are not owners. That we do not own our lives. No, our time is leased to us. Our health is leased to us. Our bodies are leased to us from God the Father. You are a tenant, not an owner. And verse 2, "When the season came, he," the father, "sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard." So at the proper time, at time of harvest, he goes. And his graciousness, his generosity is evident in the text in that he doesn't demand most of the crop. He doesn't even demand half of the crop. No, he just wants some, some of the fruit of the vineyard. In biblical narrative, fruit is often a term to designate a life that's lived in obedience to God, a life in which people use the talents, the opportunities, the gifts that God has given us, our very lives for the Lord. And then the Lord loves to bless the fruitful life with more fruit.And here, what we see, one of the things that we notice here is there is a clear relationship between the tenants and the owner. It's a hierarchical relationship. It's a vertical relationship. A lot of people when they think about Christianity and they say, "No, Christianity is not a religion. It's a relationship." And I say, "Yes, it is a relationship. We are called to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself." And to love the Lord, and that's the summary of the commandments, we keep His commandments. That's what Jesus said. "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." And so we are not to forget that our relationship with the Lord is not horizontal and He is in charge, He is God, He is in authority. The relationship is offered to us by the grace of Jesus Christ. And the only way you enter into relationship with God the Father is on your knees, in humble repentance, forever defying His authority.And do the tenants pay their rent? No, of course not. Verse 3, "And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed." What are the tenants doing here? They start acting like owners. Why should we pay you? We did all the work." And they forget that they were gifted, so to speak, that all this work that was done prior. In a sense, they disown the owner. It's almost as if the owner doesn't exist. And this is happening nowadays with squatter's rights, et cetera. That's exactly what they do. The tenants decide that they're the owners and they're exercising so-called squatter's rights.How does this appear in our lives, in our world? Well, it's when people start looking at reality and think, "I'm going to decide how reality is. I get to decide what truth is. I'm going to live my truth. I am in authority of the definition. These are the values that I've chosen for myself, the reality that I've created. It's my body, therefore my sexuality, therefore my moral code. I decide. I'm a master of my own fate, the captain of my own soul." And here, what Jesus is doing is exposing the sinfulness in our rebellious hearts, this desire to claim ownership. But to claim ownership of yourself, to live as if you are your own, you're usurping the owner.And why do they act like this? Why do we act like this? Because we are born in a flesh that is hostile to God. Romans 8:7, "For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God for it does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot." So the hostility has to do with the law. When we see God's law, we see God's demands upon us and we're hostile that God, You would demand these things. The owner just wanted a portion. He wanted some of the fruit of the harvest.And how does that apply to us? Well, the Lord wants all of us. He wants our whole life. But you know that you are living in ordered worship to the Lord. You are living underneath the authority of the Lord when you do govern yourself by the Ten Commandments. And you realize that the commandments are the way of life. This is the path of freedom.And one of them, the first commandments says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." That's the very first one. The fourth commandment says, "Thou shalt keep the Sabbath day holy." And there God makes a very specific, very clear demand. "One-seventh of your time, one day a week is mine." And by the way, this is how you grow. This is one of the greatest means of grace where you just commit and say, "Lord, I'm going to give you Sunday. Lord, I'm going to go to church on Sunday. Lord, I'm going to devote myself to the scriptures in prayer on Sunday." The Lord also tells us in the commandment, "Thou shall not steal." And God Himself, in Malachi 2, points to the commandment and he says, "You're stealing from me by not bringing the tithes to me." And there, we get very specific that God does want 10% of our earned income that we give to Him, give to His kingdom, or give to His church.Well, once you start getting very precise that this is what the commands demand of us, well, this is where people begin to experience the hostility within our hearts. For most of us, unbelief in God or lack of belief, it's not a head issue. It's not that there's not enough evidence. No, it's a will issue. Do we want to do the will of God? And there's hostility there. Intellectual skepticism for Christianity is often nothing more than a flimsy veneer covering deep-seated hostility.Aldous Huxley, the philosopher who coined the term agnostic and author of Brave New World, he said this, "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning. For myself has, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality of Christianity because it interfered with our sexual freedom. There was one admirably, simple method of justifying ourselves, agnosticism." Thomas Nagel in The Last Word writes, "I want atheism to be true. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that."These tenants know that they are tenants and they hate it. They want to work for their own profit. They want to be the owners. And in many ways, we would rather like them live with this illusion of independence or self-sufficiency. But the day of reckoning is coming and the owner was sending messengers to try to get the tenants to come to their senses. And this is point 2, a suicidal enmity toward the messengers.In verse 4 of Mark 12 says, "Again, he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully." Sometimes when I preach a sermon, someone comes up to me and say, "Pastor, that was a great sermon, good sermon." And I always say the same thing. I say, "Praise be to God. And also, I'm just the messenger. Just the messenger. I'm like the mail man. I'm like UPS guy. I like that I'm bringing you packages." I like the UPS guy because he can park anywhere he wants, sidewalks, et cetera. But I say that tongue-in-cheek because I'm always thinking about this parable. "Oh, you like that? Keep coming back." We're going to continue preaching the text. And there will be messages in which you realize that, "I don't like that message. It doesn't make me feel good. It offends my sensibilities." So when you hear a sermon like that, for me, I'm just a messenger. I'm just the UPS guy. Don't kill me.If you try, there's many a lesson here, if you are called to proclaim the Word of God and to do it very publicly, do it out front, if you are called as a man of God to proclaim the Word of God, become a pastor, I just want you to know you will get opposition and the opposition is going to be hostile. And as the world becomes more and more in hostility toward the Lord, just know there will be a cost for bringing the clear message. They struck him in the head. They wounded this gentleman. And here, this series of messengers are echoes of the prophets that the Lord sent to his people and they suffered ill-treatment from their fellow Israelites. And Jesus also taught in the Sermon of the Mount. He said, "Blessed are you when others persecute you and revile you for my name's sake. Great is your reward in heaven."Mark 12:5, "And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others, some they beat and some they killed." The immediate application is that God sent prophets to the religious leaders to tell them, "Hey, stop acting like owners. Tend God's vineyard with God's Word for His prophet." And you see the incredible grace of this owner. He could have just called the authorities on these people. They could have been thrown out. No, he sends a messenger. He sends another messenger. He sends another messenger. Just incredible patience on this man's part.And this is what God had been doing all throughout salvific history of holy Scripture. He promised, "I will not leave myself without a witness." So He kept sending them. Jeremiah sent to the people, was beaten on multiple occasions, thrown into a pit, and finally stoned to death. Elijah, Amos, both of them were banished and forced to hide in caves. Ezekiel was murdered after a sermon. Habakkuk was stoned. Zechariah got chased into the temple and stoned near the altar. Uriah who prophesied around the same time as Jeremiah, he tried to escape into exile but the king tracked him down, brought him back to Israel, and ran him through with a sword. The prophet Micah was punched in the face by false prophets. Isaiah was put into a log and cut in half. And that's not even to mention what happened to the apostles.The religious people of the day, as they're hearing the sermon, they thought they looked at their past and the past of Israel's relation to the prophets and they thought it was something that they had grown past, that they were too righteous, that they were too morally upright to do something like this. And the irony, of course, was that they're about to do something much worse than their fathers had done in that they're going to kill the Son of God.There's an important lesson here for us. When you hear about the sins of people before us or sins of people today, it's so easy to look on people with disdain as if we've somehow progressed past sin. We have not. We do all each. We have a fallen heart. So when we see someone who sins, we shouldn't say, "What's wrong with them?" We should say, "What's wrong with the human heart? What's wrong with my heart? There go I, but for the grace of God." And it is grace that God sends messengers into our lives, and what do they tell us? They remind us that there is a God who is over us. He's the owner, we're the tenants. And if we've been living as owners, we are to repent because a day of reckoning, a day of judgment is coming.There will be times, dear Christian, that you won't like the message, the message of Scripture. You won't like when a brother or sister, they bring the message to you. And by the way, this is why it's so important to be part of a church, be plugged into a church, be part of a community group where you're walking with brothers and sisters, where you've covenanted together. So that when there does come a moment where you need someone to call you out, your brother and sister are there and they say, "You've given me permission to do this by joining the church. I need to bring this message to you." At those moments, do not reject the messenger. At those moments, receive the message humbly and bring it to the Lord and say, "Lord, is there truth to this?"If you don't like the message, don't just leave. It is tempting in those moments when someone calls out your sin to just bounce, to go find a church who don't really talk about sin, where they tickle your ears, where they give you a palatable message, where you just feel good about yourself all the time. No, no. You need a church that calls you out. You need a church to remind you of how much of a wicked sinner you are so that the cross of Jesus Christ is so much more meaningful. Lord Jesus, You save me from the sin. We need this reminder that we are not the owners and that God is a God who makes demands of us. There's many a church today that preaches a message about a God that demands nothing, a God that does nothing, one whom we can control with a modest investment of time and money. In those churches, those people aren't really seeking the true God of the universe.Romans 3:10 says, "None is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God." Now, CS Lewis in his work called he Miracles, he has this tremendous low quote. "An impersonal God, well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth, and goodness inside our own heads better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap, best of all. But God himself alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband, that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hushed suddenly. Was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion, man's search for God, suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found him? We never meant it to come to that. Worse still, supposing he had found us?"God sends us messengers. Sometimes it's through preachers or pastors. Sometimes it's through brothers and sisters. Sometimes it's through providential life circumstances that they shatter the illusion that you're in control. Sometimes it's just looking in the mirror and you're like, "Oh, what happened?" We're aging. That's what happened. The fragility of life where you get that phone call where a beloved has cancer, a beloved is in the hospital, all of a sudden your worldview just shatters. And those are all gracious reminders that we are living on borrowed time. Sometimes it's unfulfilled longings where you work for years, you work for a goal to become something, to become a person, to achieve something, and then you get it and then all you feel is emptiness inside because you realize, "I worked so hard for so long for something that doesn't satisfy."Lewis writes elsewhere. "If I find myself desires which nothing in this world will satisfy, the only explanation is that I was created for another world." God shows His grace toward us in this story in repeated ways. He sends messengers, messengers to remind them, "Hey, you want to be in a right relationship with the owner. It's for your good. You're going to flourish." And also, this is a good owner. He gives him a vineyard. I don't know if anyone's ever done a vineyard tour in California, Napa Valley. I've never done it. I've driven by. I've looked over covetously. No, I've repented. But this is majestic. This is the reason why lots of these great movies, the end with a vineyard, it's almost like heaven. It smells nice. There's grapes. There's wine, and praise be to God.But this shows the graciousness of the owner. What a great God we have. He's not just a lawgiver. He could have just created a prison, thrown them inside and said, "You're going to do what I say." That's not what he does. In love, He says, "Okay, here's everything that I have created, I've cultivated, I've protected. I'm entrusting it to you. Keep growing it. And all I ask for is a portion in return." If God were merely a lawgiver, I could in a sense understand people against Him. But He's not just a lawgiver. He's the giver of every good and perfect gift, including His law. He is the source and fount of every blessing and yet people spurn Him.The tenants don't listen to the messengers so the owner sends his son, and this is point 3, suicidal enmity toward the Son. Verse 6, "He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them saying, "They will respect my son." The phrase "beloved son" echoes a story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac. God came to him and said, "Take your son, your only son, your long-awaited son, your beloved son, and sacrifice him." Finally, He sent him to them last of all eschaton in the Greek. It's a technical term for the end of days. "Perhaps they'll respect my son." In verse 7, "But those tenants said to one another, 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours.'" "This is the heir, come."And readers, if you're reading this for the first time, you would imagine that okay, tenants, they finally come to their senses when they recognize the son as the father's surrogate. And perhaps if they sat down and reason things out, they would say, "Come on, let's get out of here. What are we doing? The judgment of the owner is coming down upon us." But instead of adopting the prudent course of respecting the son, they adopt the insane one of murdering him. And it's absolutely insane because there is no court that would've accepted the fact that their owners, especially if the owner was killed or the owner's son was killed. And this is a very well resourced father. What do they think is going to happen if they kill the father's beloved son? Here, we see suicidal enmity has blinded them to the insanity of this plan.And what are they longing for? For freedom from the owner. And this is what a lot of people want today. They want freedom from God, not recognizing that there is no freedom from God. We are designed to find our true freedom and right relationship with God and right relationship with his laws. True freedom isn't found when we usurp all control or all rules. It's found when we find the God who created us. We're created in His image. He knows how we're wired and He knows how we are to operate, to flourish. And we do that according to His law. The world says there is no truth. You make your own truth. And Jesus responds and He says, "No, I am the truth. And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free."And what's the truth? The truth is that you are a sinner. I'm a sinner. We've transgressed God's law. But Jesus is a savior and He loves you. His love frees you to love Him back. And if we love Him, we keep His commandments. And here again, we see just how incomprehensible the mercy of this owner is and how incomprehensible the mercy of God is. After they kill messenger after messenger after messenger, He sends His beloved Son. "Come, let us kill him." That phrase is an echo of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. And since the tenant's words are identical with those of Joseph's evil brothers, we see a connection.The tenants of course act irrationally. And that's what God charges Israel with in doing in Isaiah 1:2-3. Chapter 1:2-3, "Hear, oh heavens, and give ear, oh earth, for the Lord has spoken. 'Children have I reared and brought up but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey it's master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand.'" What do they do with the son? Verse 8, "And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard." The language here is reminiscent of the cross that Jesus Christ was crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem. The greatest evidence for our deep-seated hostility to God is the one time in the history of the world when God made himself physically vulnerable, people arrested Him, beat Him, tortured, crucified, and murdered Him.John 15:23-25 says, the words of Christ, "Whoever hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. But now they have seen and hated both me and my Father, but the word that is written in their law must be fulfilled. 'They hated me without cause.'" It's like the Lord of the sheep, the great Shepherd, Jesus Christ. It says if He summons a few sheep from the flock and sends them back to the flock and say, "Teach the sheep how to live, teach the sheep my ways." And what do the sheep do? The sheep take them and begin to kill them. And then the shepherd becomes the sheep and the sheep slaughter him.Well, it turned out these weren't sheep at all. They're wolves in sheep's clothing. And what do you do with wolves who destroy sheep? You destroy them. And that's Mark 12:9, "What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others." The owner of the vineyard and the greatest courtyards is the Lord, the Lord of the vineyard. It's the same word that's used for God in the Old Testament, Yahweh. There will be a time when Yahweh comes back. There will be a time where the Lord of the vineyard is going to come and He's going to judge. He'll come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.Who are the tenants in the immediate context? The Jewish leaders recognize that Jesus is talking about them. They view themselves as the tenants. They realize exactly what he's saying and they want to kill him. That's the insanity of it. He's calling the shots. He's telling the parable, "Do not do this. Do not kill the son." And they plan to kill the son. And if you follow this parable closely, you realize the removal of the tenants from the vineyard and transferring it to others. Jesus here is talking about deposing the Jewish leadership from spiritual authority over the people of God and then transferring that spiritual leadership to the church where Jesus Christ is the head of His body, the church. She is His bride. He is the head. And all throughout the Book of Acts, we see them wielding that authority.And you see that through the history of Jerusalem when it was destroyed in the Jewish war in years 66 through 73 as the church grew by the power of the Spirit. Therefore, the banished tenants represent Israel and the favored others, the early church which was the fusion of Jews and Gentiles who represent true Israel. Israel has lost its status as the people of God as symbolized by the catastrophic defeat in the Jewish war and has been replaced by the church. In Mark 12:10, Jesus continues, "Have you not read this Scripture? 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and this was the Lord's doing and it was marvelous in our eyes.'"Jesus here quotes Psalm 1:18, one of the five Psalms of the Hallel sung throughout Passover week. And when he entered in Jerusalem and everyone cried out, "Hosanna in the highest," they were quoting from the Psalm as well. So Jesus here quotes Psalm 1:18 and He says, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." He's talking about Himself. "I will be rejected but I am actually a foundational stone, the cornerstone for the church, for the people of God." And that cornerstone imagery, it's very clear. That's the most important stone in the foundation. But here in this text, in particular in Isaiah 28, it talks about Jesus as the foundational stone. But here for cornerstone, the Greek word for head is used. It's the head stone. And some commentators have argued that this is the elevated cornerstone or the key stone in the arch of the temple. And evidence for this is there was a head of the corner crowning the temple of God.So in one sense, Jesus Christ is our foundation, but he's also the crown of our lives. He's a crown of the church. He is the head of our lives. He was rejected, but his rejection led to our acceptance. Therefore, it's marvelous in our eyes. The father, when he sent the son, He said, "They will respect my son." And in a sense you read that and you're like, "That seems highly naive. Messenger after messenger was killed. Why do you think they're going to respect your son?" In a sense, yeah, they didn't respect him. But in a sense this is also prophetic. There will come a time when everybody will respect the name of Jesus Christ. Either we accept His name, either we accept His authority and lordship over our lives now in humility, we come humbly, or we will be humbled when He returns for the second judgment. When the son shows up, he's killed out of enmity. But the wisdom and the beauty of the glory of the gospel is the very killing that comes from their enmity is the very way in which God slays that enmity.Verse 12, "When they were seeking to arrest Him but fear the people for they perceived that He had told the parable against them, so they left Him and went away." They still fear the crowd because the crowd is still with Jesus so they need to hatch a plan where they take the crowd support away from Jesus. And that's what the next part of the text is about in verse 13. "And they sent to Him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians to trap him in his talk." The Herodians are mentioned here because Herod was a proxy of Caesar. So he would collect the taxes from the Jewish people and the taxes then funneled through his coffers would go to Caesar. Obviously, he made a killing off of it.So the Herodians, they wanted the people to pay the taxes, hot button issue. And they know it's a trick because Jesus, if you say, "No, don't pay your taxes," now we can appeal to Caesar and he's going to kill you. If you say, "Go and pay your taxes," now the people will say, "Oh Jesus said you were the king. Why are we supporting Rome?" So that's the trap.Mark 12:14, "They came and said to Him, 'Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? And should we pay them or should we not?'" They start by saying, "You are true," which is hypocritical because he is true. They're unwittingly witnessing to the truth. But a few lines earlier, the chief scribes sent a question. They said through their proxies, they said, "By whose authority are you doing the things you're doing?" And here, all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, we know you are true. We know whose authority." Obviously they're being hypocritical."You are true." That means there's no sin, there's no lies, there's no prevarication. "You do not care about anyone's opinion," meaning you fear God over people. So when people's opinions contradict the will of God or the teaching of God, you don't care. "And you are not swayed by appearances," meaning you don't judge by appearances. You don't show partiality. And in that, in this, he's reflecting God Himself for Samuel 16:7. "But the Lord said to Samuel, 'Do not look on his appearance on the height of his stature because I've rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.'" And the trap here is they're saying, "Lord, if you don't care about anyone's opinions, you definitely don't care about the emperor's opinions."And the Messiah according to Isaiah 11:3 would imitate God in making impartial judgments. Isaiah 11:3, "And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide disputes by what his ears hear." And Jesus, we know that You truly teach the way of God. That's what Jesus came to do, teach the way of God. And then the question, is it lawful to pay tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or should we not? And then here are the taxes, the poll tax that Caesar demanded off of every person. How does Jesus respond? Verse 15. "But knowing their hypocrisy, their pretense, He said to them, 'Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.'"Denarius was a Roman currency. You pay Roman taxes with Roman currency. Denarius represented a day's wage. And if you take the coin, on the front, it was inscription. There was Tiberius with a laurel crowned head. And then the inscription around his head said "Tiberius Caesar, son of the deified Augustus, himself Augustus". And on the reverse side it would say Pontifex Maximus, which is high priest. On the one side it says he is Dei. They were deifying Caesar, and he's also our high priest. Blasphemous. And this is why the Jews had a problem with these coins is blasphemous.And Jesus said, "Bring me one." In verse 16, "They brought one and he said to them, 'Whose likeness and inscription is this?' They said to him, 'Caesar's.' Jesus said to them, 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.' And they marveled at him." I remember when I read this for the first time as a kid. I fell in love with Jesus because I was like, "Ah, Jesus is the best trash talker. He's better than anybody. He puts it."But the deeper you study the Scripture, you realize just the profound depth of the wisdom of God. They start the conversation with a battle for authority and He ends the conversation with a battle of authority. Who wins? God Himself. What is Jesus saying here? He's saying, "Whose image is on that coin? Caesar's. Okay, give unto Caesar's what is Caesar's." And then he says, "Whose image is on you? Whose image is on you? Whose image and likeness is on you? Give unto God's yourself what is God's genius." The coin which bears the image of Caesar, we give to Caesar. We however, as men and women who bear the image of God, we owe ourselves to God. We will give Caesar's unto Caesar but we will not render unto Caesar what is God's even if Caesar demands it. No, we won't.So this is a reminder for us friends to give what is God's to God. Give your whole life as a living sacrifice to the Lord. Bring your Sabbath to the Lord. Give your tithes to the Lord. Use your talents for the Lord's kingdom. And we do this because we long to, not just because we're obligated to. Know that duty has become a choice. John Newton in Amazing Grace writes, "Our pleasure and our duty, the opposite before. Since we have seen His beauty, are joined, depart no more." Our pleasure and our duty, it is our pleasure to do our duty for the Lord. Newton's friend William Cowper wrote, "To see the law by Christ fulfilled and to hear His pardoning voice changes a slave into a child and duty into choice."And what's the only thing that can heal our hearts of our enmity and hostility toward God? It's recognizing and accepting the love of God for us. Corinthians 5:18 says, "All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that is in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."If you're here today and you're not sure where you stand before God, if you were to die today and you're not sure where you would go, today, you have a decision to make. If you do not repent of your sins, if you do not place your faith in Christ, if you do not accept the gospel of Jesus Christ and His grace, if you died today, you are going to be separated from God for all eternity and His wrath will be upon you in a place called hell. But thankfully, you're not dead yet. Thankfully, we still have a chance to repent. And thanks be to the work of Christ, we can be forgiven. If you don't admit you're an enemy, you'll stay one and you'll be crushed when Christ returns to judge. If you admit you're an enemy, you'll no longer be one Lord, I have been an enemy. I have been in rebellion. Lord, forgive me. I accept your amnesty. Lord, welcome me into your kingdom.Matthew 21:44, "And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces. And when it falls on anyone, it will crush him." Either allow your hard heart to be shattered by His love and then He heals it or remain at war with God, which is suicidal and you will be crushed. We come humbly to the Lord or we will be humbled in the judgment. Either you say to God, "God, Thy will be done. I'm not my own," or God will one day say to you, "Thy will be done. You are your own. Go."I'm going to close by praying the Lord's prayer as Jesus taught us to pray. And you're welcome to pray in your heart with me. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil.Father, we thank You for sending your Son, and Lord Jesus, we thank You that You went to the cross with eyes wide open. You knew the cost and it was a terrible cost, but You did that in order to atone for our sins. And we thank You, Holy Spirit, that You're with us today. And I pray, if there's anyone who is still stuck in their rebellious ways, I pray, Lord, melt their hearts. I pray give them spiritual resurrection of their souls in this Holy Week. I pray that this week will be holy in their lives, that they will be drawn into Your kingdom and into Your church. And Lord, bless us this week as we meditate upon your final week before the crucifixion. And Lord, give us opportunities to share the great gospel with our friends, neighbors, or anyone else who would listen. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

En el momento más agudo de su depresión, John Newton acompañó a William Cowper, siendo muestra de la gracia de Dios para con él. Este es un ejemplo de cómo una amistad fundamentada en la fe puede perseverar en medio del valle de sombra de muerte. SÍGUENOS Sitio web: https://volvamosalevangelio.org/ X: https://twitter.com/volvamosevg TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@volvamos_al_evangelio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/volvamosalevangelio/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/volvamosevangelio/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/volvamosevangelio/

In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick's estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan's new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023). In the book he aims to “present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge” (vii). His defense of this foundational critical method joins a slate of recent metacritical books on the discipline of literary study, and the state of the humanities today. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching are in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. His prior publications include Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). His current book project on Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments is titled Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism. He is also director of the Lewis Walpole Library and the editor (with Steven Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press. The image accompanying this episode was drawn by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick's estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan's new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023). In the book he aims to “present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge” (vii). His defense of this foundational critical method joins a slate of recent metacritical books on the discipline of literary study, and the state of the humanities today. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching are in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. His prior publications include Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). His current book project on Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments is titled Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism. He is also director of the Lewis Walpole Library and the editor (with Steven Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press. The image accompanying this episode was drawn by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick's estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan's new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023). In the book he aims to “present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge” (vii). His defense of this foundational critical method joins a slate of recent metacritical books on the discipline of literary study, and the state of the humanities today. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching are in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. His prior publications include Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). His current book project on Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments is titled Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism. He is also director of the Lewis Walpole Library and the editor (with Steven Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press. The image accompanying this episode was drawn by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Cowper was prone to bouts of severe depression and even tried to take his life. Yet the Lord used him to write a hymn we still sing today.

William Cowper (pronounced Cooper) was prone to bouts of severe depression and even tried to take his life. Yet the Lord used him to write a hymn we still sing today. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth tells the story on REVIVE OUR HEARTS. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/453/29

William Cowper (pronounced Cooper) was prone to bouts of severe depression and even tried to take his life. Yet the Lord used him to write a hymn we still sing today. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth tells the story on REVIVE OUR HEARTS. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/453/29

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“The dogma of…skepticism about truth-claims—a routine feature of humanities instruction these days…is part of the atmosphere of our times. One does not need college to inculcate it; one needs college to disabuse young people from it.”~Prof. Wilfred M. McClay, contemporary historian “If the truth is what sets us free, then why not walk in it at all times? With wisdom and love, of course, but also with the reality that truth is where freedom begins.”~Jackie Hill Perry, writer and hip-hop artist “Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” “Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”~G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer and literary critic “True freedom is to be one's true self, but my true self is made for loving, and loving is self-giving. So in order to be myself, I have to deny myself and give myself. In order, then, to be free, I have to give up my freedom. In order, then, to live, I have to die to my self-centeredness. In order to find myself, I've got to lose it.”~John Stott (1921-2011), English Anglican priest and theologian  “Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.”~George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish minister and writer “And isn't that what freedom is supposed to be? The ability to not do as I please, but the power to do what is pleasing.”~Jackie Hill Perry, writer and hip-hop artist “The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.”~C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), literary scholar at Oxford and Cambridge “To see the Law by Christ fulfilled, and hear his pardoning voice,changes a slave into a child, and duty into a choice.”~William Cowper (1731-1800), English poetSERMON PASSAGEGalatians 3:23-4:7 (ESV) Galatians 3 23 Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.Galatians 41 I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, 2 but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. 3 In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

In 1785 William Cowper wrote the poem, “in The Task” where he stated that variety is the spice of life that gives it all its flavor”. However, when it comes to food, spices are wonderful, but…

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“It is better to be hurt by the truth than to be comforted with a lie.”~Khaled Hosseini, Afghan-born novelist and physician “We shall never be clothed with the righteousness of Christ except that we first know assuredly that we have no righteousness of our own.”~John Calvin (1509-1564), Genevan reformer “Take heart sinner, and do not despair. Hope in him whom you fear, flee to him from whom you have fled…. Dear name…of delight, name of comfort to the sinner, name of blessed hope. For what is Jesus except to say Savior? So, Jesus, for your own sake, be to me Jesus.”~Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4-1109), monk, theologian, and archbishop “We obey God not because we are afraid of what He will do to us…. Rather, we obey Him because we are moved by all that He has done for us in Jesus Christ.”~Anthony J. Carter, pastor and author “To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and hear His pardoning voice,Changes a slave into a child, and duty into choice.”~William Cowper (1730-1800), poet and hymnwriter “I don't believe it is wise or truthful to the power of the gospel to identify oneself by the sins of one's past or the temptations of one's present….”~Jackie Hill Perry, writer and hip-hop artist “Justification by faith alone frees me to love my neighbor…for his or her own sake…. Since we no longer have to carry around the intolerable burden of self-justification, we are free ‘to be Christs unto one another,' as Luther put it, to expend ourselves on behalf of one another, even as Christ also loved us and gave Himself for us.”~Timothy George & John Woodbridge in The Mark of Jesus “My grand objection to the religious system still held by many… is, that it tends to render Christianity… a system of prohibitions rather than of privilege and hopes, and thus the injunction to rejoice, so strongly enforced in the New Testament, is practically neglected, and Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.”~William Wilberforce (1759-1833), British politician and slavery abolitionistSERMON PASSAGEGalatians 2:11-21 (ESV) 1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. 2 I went up because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain. 3 But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. 4 Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery— 5 to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. 6 And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me. 7 On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised 8 (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles), 9 and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. 10 Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. 11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” 15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.17 But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

To reconcile offending man, Make Justice drop her angry rod; What creature could have formed the plan, Or who fulfill it but a God? No drop remains of all the curse, For wretches who deserved the whole; No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce The guilty, but returning soul. Peace by such means so dearly bought, What rebel could have hoped to see? Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought, His Sovereign fastened to a tree. – William Cowper

In his hymn, Sometimes a Light Surprises, William Cowper, reflects on the message of the prophet Habakkuk:Though vine nor fig tree neither
Their wonted fruit shall bear,
Though all the field should wither,
Nor flocks nor herds be there:
Yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice;
For, while in Him confiding,
I cannot but rejoice.Join us this Sunday and together we will continue our reflection of the prophet Habakkuk.Pastor Josh

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“If physical objects please you, praise God for them, but turn back your love to their Creator, lest, in those things which please you, you displease him.” ~Confessions by St. Augustine (354-430), bishop in North Africa “But the most obvious fact about praise – whether of God or anything – strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise… I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.”~C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms “If a psalm was ever written round the promises to Abraham that he would be both blessed and made a blessing, it could well have been such as this.”~ Derek Kidner, Psalms “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,But trust Him for His grace;Behind a frowning providenceHe hides a smiling face.”~ “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” by William CowperSERMON PASSAGEPsalm 67 (ESV)1 May God be gracious to us and bless us  and make his face to shine upon us, Selah2 that your way may be known on earth,  your saving power among all nations.3 Let the peoples praise you, O God;  let all the peoples praise you! 4 Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,  for you judge the peoples with equity  and guide the nations upon earth. Selah5 Let the peoples praise you, O God;  let all the peoples praise you! 6 The earth has yielded its increase;  God, our God, shall bless us.7 God shall bless us;  let all the ends of the earth fear him!

How does suffering separate the person going through it from their friends and loved ones? Priscilla Gilman joins the podcast to talk about a poem that takes on that question in literal terms—it tells the tragic story of a sailor who drowns as his shipmates are forced to sail away—and that sees it, at the same time, as a question we all have to face, William Cowper's "The Castaway."Priscilla Gilman is the author of two books: The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011) and The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir (Norton, 2023). She's a former English professor, first at Yale University and then at Vassar College, during which time she published an important article on Cowper's letters in ELH. You can follow Priscilla on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast.

To reconcile offending man, Make Justice drop her angry rod; What creature could have formed the plan, Or who fulfill it but a God? No drop remains of all the curse, For wretches who deserved the whole; No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce The guilty, but returning soul. Peace by such means so dearly bought, What rebel could have hoped to see? Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought, His Sovereign fastened to a tree. – William Cowper

To reconcile offending man, Make Justice drop her angry rod; What creature could have formed the plan, Or who fulfill it but a God? No drop remains of all the curse, For wretches who deserved the whole; No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce The guilty, but returning soul. Peace by such means so dearly bought, What rebel could have hoped to see? Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought, His Sovereign fastened to a tree. – William Cowper

A troubled poet --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dearpadre/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dearpadre/support

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“To set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of [self]. This is sin at its evil root. Sins may multiply like the sands by the seashore, but they are yet one. Sins are because sin is. This is the rationale behind the much-maligned doctrine of natural depravity which holds that the independent man can do nothing but sin and that his good deeds are really not good at all.”~A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) in Knowledge of the Holy “My God, shall sin its power maintain. And in my soul defiant live!‘Tis not enough that Thou forgive, The cross must rise and self be slain.O God of love, Thy power disclose: ‘Tis not enough that Christ should rise,I, too, must seek the brightening skies, And rise from death, as Christ arose.”~Greek hymn, translated by John Brownlie (1911) “The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights.”~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), prominent Scottish clergyman “We can have no power from Christ unless we live in a persuasion that we have none of our own.”~John Owen (1616-1683), English church leader, theologian, and academic “Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees.”~William Cowper (1731-1800), poet who suffered with intense depression “The problem with our nature is that it corrupts our minds, inflates our ego, meddles with our vision, and darkens our understanding so that when God decides to tell us anything, we determine its integrity by how we feel over who God has revealed himself to be. “Holiness (and goodness) should never be determined by the whims, wishes, and standards of a created thing or even a whole culture. Especially when that culture's ideas are so easily influenced by the deceitful hearts within it, as well as its overall mutability, taking different shapes in conformity to its era…. God defines God.”~Jackie Hill Perry, poet, writer, and hip-hop artistSERMON PASSAGEJohn 14 & 16 and Acts 1 & 2 (ESV)John 14 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.  John 16 7 …I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you…. 14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  Acts 1 1 In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3 He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God…. 6 So when [the apostles] had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 9 And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.  Acts 2 1 When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.5 Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. 6 And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. 7 And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “…we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” 14 …But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them… 22 “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— 23 this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. 24 God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it…. 33 Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing…. 36 Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” 37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit…. 41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Songs of Resistance: Dangers, Toils & Snares. AKA, Amazing Grace. Welcome to another mini series of The Wanderer, this time focused on trying to understand and define worship. Each episode will look at the history of a particular Hymn and its origin story, how it may have roots in Justice and what it may encourage us to participate in today. Further, every episode will end with a recorded version of the song by Tim, to listen to after walking through the song's history. This week, it is what is most likely the most famous and well known song of all time: "Amazing Grace." What is the history of this song? How has it lasted so long? Why is it so popular? Tim covers some of the history, but not all. There was Newton being exiled himself, his father rescuing him. The relationship between himself and William Cowper, William Wilberforce... William Walker (so many Williams...). The Second Great Awakening, Dwight Moody... There is so much to cover. But the main piece is, what is Grace? How does it inform our lives? How does justice and resistance play in? This is the long road. Some points of reference: "John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace," by Jonathan Aitkin "Why Obama's Singing of 'Amazing Grace' is so Powerful," by Sarah L. Kaufman Tim's rendition, "Dangers, Toils & Snares," can be heard on SPOTIFY, APPLE MUSIC or any other streaming platform. As always, we encourage and would love discussion as we pursue. Always feel free to email in questions to hello@voxpodcast.com, and to engage the conversation on Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about the Voxology Podcast Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify Support the Voxology Podcast on Patreon The Voxology Spotify channel can be found here: Voxology Radio Follow us on Instagram: @voxologypodcast and "like" us on Facebook Follow Mike on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeerre Music in this episode by Timothy John Stafford Instagram & Twitter: @GoneTimothy

William Cowper (1731–1800), the English poet, found a friend in his pastor, John Newton (1725–1807), the former slave trader. Cowper suffered from depression and anxiety, attempting to die by suicide more than once. When Newton visited him, they’d go on long walks together and talk about God. Thinking that Cowper would benefit from engaging creatively and having a reason to write his poetry, the minister had the idea to compile a hymnal. Cowper contributed many songs, including “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” When Newton moved to another church, he and Cowper remained strong friends and corresponded regularly for the rest of Cowper’s life. I see parallels between the strong friendship of Cowper and Newton with that of David and Jonathan in the Old Testament. After David defeated Goliath, “Jonathan became one in spirit with David,” loving him as himself (1 Samuel 18:1). Although Jonathan was the son of King Saul, he defended David against the king’s jealousy and anger, asking his father why David should be put to death. In response, “Saul hurled his spear at him to kill him” (1 Samuel 20:33). Jonathan dodged the weapon and was grieved at this shameful treatment of his friend (v. 34). For both sets of friends, their bond was life-giving as they spurred on each other to serve and love God. How might you similarly encourage a friend today?

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Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Hay is the author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Kathryn Sutherland is the author of Why Modern Manuscript Matters and Senior Research Fellow in English at the University of Oxford. Together they join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson's life and work at St Paul's Churchyard, the heart of England's book trade since medieval times.   We listen to the conversation around Johnson's dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano's memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld's books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison. From Johnson's St Paul's we then travel to Mayfair, where John Murray II is hosting literary salons with Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, and taking a chance on Jane Austen. To complete our tour, we glimpse the anatomy experiments in the basement of Benjamin Franklin's house by the Strand. Our round-up of book recommendations includes Konstantin Paustovsky's The Story of a Life which begins in Ukraine, Winifred Holtby's conversations with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, a fresh look at Jane Austen's Emma and an evocation of the Aldeburgh coast as we visit Ronald Blythe for tea. Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 61 (1:23) Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone, Plain Foxed Edition (2:01) Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (2:52) Kathryn Sutherland, Why Modern Manuscripts Matter William Cowper, The Task (15:46) William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is out of print (24:09) John Knowles, The Life and Writing of Henry Fuseli is out of print (24:12) Mary Scott, The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead is out of print (27:36) Slightly Foxed Cubs series of children's books (31:52) Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (35:53) Maria Rundell, Mrs Rundell's Domestic Cookery is out of print (46:01) Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life, translated by Douglas Smith (50:52) Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre (52:40) Jane Austen, Emma (53:16) Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation is out of print (54:07) Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir is out of print (54:44) Winifred Holtby, South Riding (55:46) Ronald Blythe, The Time by the Sea (56:46) Related Slightly Foxed Articles Letters from the Heart, Daisy Hay on Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Issue 51 Just Getting on with It, A. F. Harrold on William Cowper, Selected Poems, Issue 23 The Abyss Beyond the Orchard, Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters, Issue 53 ‘By God, I'm going to spin', Paul Routledge on the novels of Winifred Holtby, Issue 32 Other Links Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare (11:42) Dr Johnson's House, City of London (49:52) Benjamin Franklin House, Charing Cross, London (49:56) Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Opening Song: There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood (https://open.spotify.com/track/0kqZgSpy4zwrS4uCzsz8PC?si=130500657d8f47ab) by Edwin Othello Excell, Lowell Mason, and William Cowper; arranged by the Norton Hall Band Lyrics: There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel's veins And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains Lose all their guilty stains Lose all their guilty stains And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains The dying thief rejoiced to see That fountain in his day And there may I though vile as he Wash all my sins away Wash all my sins away Wash all my sins away And there may I though vile as he Wash all my sins away Dear dying Lamb Thy precious blood Shall never lose its pow'r Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved to sin no more Be saved to sin no more Be saved to sin no more Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved to sin no more E'er since by faith I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply Redeeming love has been my theme And shall be till I die And shall be till I die And shall be till I die Redeeming love has been my theme And shall be till I die When this poor lisping, stamm'ring tongue Lies silent in the grave Then in a nobler sweeter song I'll sing Thy pow'r to save I'll sing Thy pow'r to save I'll sing Thy pow'r to save Then in a nobler sweeter song I'll sing Thy pow'r to save Passage: On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. 12 And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers,[a] who stood at a distance 13 and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” 14 When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; 16 and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” Musical Reflection: Jesus, Remember Me by Jacques Berthier Reflection Notes: “Jesus, Remember Me” is a tune from the French Taizé tradition; these simple songs are meant to be repeated indefinitely with added instrumentation or voice parts. They are meant to be meditative and allow for prayer. Prayer: O God, our refuge and strength, true source of all godliness: Graciously hear the devout prayers of your Church, and grant that those things which we ask faithfully, we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Has escuchado hablar de William Cowper? El da de hoy conoceremos ms sobre la vida de este hombre que una vez que vio la verdad y la abraz, entr en una relacin personal con Cristo. Hoy en da es conocido por un hermoso himno que refleja un poderoso testimonio de la gracia salvadora de Dios. Nancy nos recuerda por medio de esta historia que Dios puede redimir toda prueba que enfrentemos en la vida para Su gloria y que algunos de los frutos ms dulces pueden salir de las vidas y circunstancias ms desesperadas. S animada con estas verdades eternas en este episodio de Aviva Nuestros Corazones. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/1337/29

IN THIS EPISODE: "Jesus, Where'er Thy People Meet" by William Cowper (1731-1800)“My time and thoughts much engrossed today by an afflicting and critical dispensation at Orchard Side. I was sent for early this morning, and returned astonished and grieved. How mysterious are the ways of the Lord! How much seems now at stake! But while all is in His hands all is safe. Could hardly attend to anything else.”Show Notes:  "Songs of Iceland" by Ben Mcelroy "That Was the Day" by Ben Mcelroy Facebook: www.facebook.com/storiesofhymnsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/hymn.stories/Hymn Stories is a part of the Media Gratiae Podcast Network.

Depression isn't the only form of mental illness touched upon in this episode, which doubles as a rumination on agency and affliction more generally. Fortunately, it's lot more fun than it sounds! Referenced and recommended resources include: Quotations: "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation to the Bad Thing" by David Foster Wallace (https://quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf), Frank Lake's Clinical Theology (https://mbird.com/theology/frank-lake-on-confession-depression-and/) Books and Literature: The Poems of William Cowper (https://amzn.to/3PcxdVS), "The Depressed Person" (https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf) by David Foster Wallace Movies and Television: You're the Worst (2014-2019), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Pollyanna (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNuR-wQfQAY) (2003), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Songs: “Christmastime Is Here Again” by Vince Guaraldi, “What Is Sadness” by Device, “Fear of Ghosts” by The Cure, “Give Mi Wings” by Rod Stewart, “Stop in the Name of Love” by The Supremes, “I Don't Want to be a Freak (But I Can't Help Myself)” By Dynasty, “Waking the Witch” – Kate Bush, “Doctor Doctor” by Thompson Twins, “Going Round in Circles” by The Keeper, “The Sun Always Shines on TV” by A-Ha, “Where There is Faith There Is Hope” by Chairman of the Board, “Please Read the Letter” by Robert Plant and Allison Kraus, “Pressure Time” by Vendetta Palace, “Baahubali” by Khoya Hain, “Dancing with the Aliens” by Fab, “Jesu Lover of My Soul”, “I Don't Want to Get Over You” by The Magnetic Fields, “Switching Off” – Elbow, “The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2

This week we talk with Diana Gruver, author of Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt. She talks to us about the struggles of people like Charles Spurgeon, Mother Theresa, William Cowper, Martin Luther King Jr., and more. In the intro, Robert & Holly talk about historical figures that have shaped them.Things we mention in this episode/other resources:- CXMH ep. 155 - Spirituality in Therapy Sessions (feat. Russell Siler Jones)- the Look Up Conference that Holly mentions- the Puddcast ep #110: Facing depression with saints from the past (with Diana Gruver)Connect with Diana on her website, on Facebook, or on Twitter. Buy Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt on Amazon.Quotes:- “I don't know of a better way to unravel stigma than through the telling of stories.” (tweet)Join the Cxmhunity on Facebook!Connect with Robert on his website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.Connect with Holly on her website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.Connect more with CXMH on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest.Ways to support CXMH:- make a pledge on Patreon and get rewards like submitting questions for upcoming interviews, a mug, sticker, t-shirt, or more!- give a one-time gift using PayPal- Buy books from previous guests on Bookshop- Do your Amazon shopping through this link- Leave us a rating & review on iTunes or Google Play- Check out our CXMH merchandise to show off your support- Check out other episodes and find your favorites guests on our website.Intro/Outro music for this episode is ‘Fall Down' by Rivers & Robots.

There he knelt down and poured out his heart unto the Lord in prayer and praise. It pleased the Savior to hear him, and to grant him at once a renewed sense of his presence, deliverance from his fears, and a sweet assurance that, wherever his lot might be cast, the God of all consolation would still be with him.Special thanks to Heath Walton for his work on setting this hymn to music and performing it. Show Notes:  "How Blest Thy Creature Is, O God" by William Cowper, performed by Heath Walton "Adagio" by Roo Walker "Lost in Thoughts" by AK "Two Acres" by Arend Facebook: www.facebook.com/storiesofhymnsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/hymn.stories/Hymn Stories is a part of the Media Gratiae Podcast Network.