Skip to main content

I need Thee!

I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord;
No tender voice like Thine can peace afford.
I need Thee, O I need Thee;
Every hour I need Thee;
O bless me now, my Savior,
I come to Thee.

(Annie Hawks, 1836-1918)

Annie Hawks wrote :
"One day as a young wife and mo­ther of 37 years of age, I was bu­sy with my reg­u­lar house­hold tasks. Sud­den­ly, I be­came so filled with the sense of near­ness to the Mast­er that, won­der­ing how one could live with­out Him, ei­ther in joy or pain, these words, “I Need Thee Ev­e­ry Hour,” were ush­ered in­to my mind, the thought at once tak­ing full pos­sess­ion of me"
After writing the lyr­ics, Hawks gave them to her pas­tor, Ro­bert Low­ry, who add­ed the tune and re­frain. The hymn was first pub­lished at the Na­tion­al Bap­tist Sun­day School Con­ven­tion in Cin­cin­na­ti, Ohio, in No­vem­ber 1872. Some years lat­er, af­ter the death of her hus­band, Hawks wrote:
"I did not un­der­stand at first why this hymn had touched the great throb­bing heart of hu­man­i­ty. It was not un­til long af­ter, when the sha­dow fell over my way, the sha­dow of a great loss, that I un­der­stood some­thing of the com­fort­ing pow­er in the words which I had been per­mit­ted to give out to others in my hour of sweet se­ren­i­ty and peace".
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →