SEARCH ME

A monthly series on inspiring hymns.

A hundred years ago in Ireland, a little nine-year-old boy prayed to become a Christian. His life would end at age 75 across the Atlantic in Asheville, N.C., where the next day he was to speak at a Southern Baptist convention. By then James Edwin Orr was known world-wide as an evangelist and historian of revival movements.

But first came his youth and the death of his father and older brother. Forced to leave college, he worked in a bakery to support his mother and siblings. At 19, he and a friend began open-air evangelism in Belfast. At 23, he believed God was calling him to be a traveling evangelist, and was soon preaching across Britain. Then he sailed to Canada for meetings, held more in the United States, and then went on to New Zealand, Australia, and Africa, concluding with meetings in Norway.

By then, he felt he needed to rest—and also needed a helpmate. He telegraphed a young woman he'd met in South Africa and proposed. She agreed. They held an evangelistic meeting at their wedding reception.

Orr's evangelistic travels (including a stint as a chaplain in the Air Force, seeing service in the South Pacific) would take him around the world—150 countries including the Soviet Union. Said another way, he preached in two-thirds of the world's 600 major cities. He was also a scholar, with earned doctorates from universities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America—including a Ph.D. From Oxford, and a Ed.D. From UCLA. He became known as the foremost authority on the world's great revivals, with his doctoral dissertation on the Second Great Awakening in England in the mid 1800s. He wrote numerous books, sometimes two a year.

His studies pointed to one major fact of revivals: they had to begin with prayer. He once wrote: “Little by little, the church loses its grip on essential things, becomes a social club, goes to sleep or flies off at a tangent. All over the world we find sleeping churches, and all around them are the gospel-starved masses. Instead of performing the first things of importance, evangelizing the masses, they are engaged in a bewildering variety of pastimes—anything but the real thing.”

Located on the north island of New Zealand's up-side-down
"boot," the town where Orr evangelized was named
for a 17th century tribal-healing wedding reception

Yet for all his scholarly and evangelistic work, Orr is best remembered for a simple hymn that grew out of revival meetings he held in Ngaruawahia (N-gu-ru-WAH-hee-a), New Zealand when he was only 24 years old. Covered by intense prayer, the meetings resulted in huge numbers of conversions, reconciliations between believers, and hearty singing in services.

When Orr prepared to leave the country, four Maori girls approached him with a beautiful indigenous song of farewell. He couldn't forget the beautiful melody, and English words for it starting coming to him, based on Psalm 139:23-24. Quickly he jotted them down on the back of an envelope. Eventually, that hymn would become popularized throughout Australia in the 1930s and through the English-speaking world.

It was said of him: “Some men read history, some write it, and others make it. So far as the history of religious revivals is concerned, J. Edwin Orr belongs to all three categories.”

A longish commercial precedes the music video. Click on "skip ad" to hear this inspiring hymn sung by an all-men chorus:

The Cathedrals - Search Me O God (Live) - YouTube

Considering reading through the uplifting comments by listeners below the video.

HERE IS LOVE

Wales, tucked between England and the Irish Sea, birthed this month's featured hymn. As our world groans under civil unrest and pandemic losses—many praying for revival—there's encouragement in the hymn that marked revival a century-plus ago in Wales: “Here is Love, Vast as the Ocean.”

Wales had a long history of Catholic, Anglican, and Calvinistic faith expressions with periodic revivals. In the mid-1700s, William Williams (known as the “Sweet Singer of Wales”), brought not just revival but some thousand hymns to the people, including “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” That movement was followed by translation to Welsh of the Catechism, Psalms and the Book of Common Prayer. Literacy was promoted; an estimated half of the 450,000 Welsh learned to read. Into this increased literacy came the Wesley brothers and their Methodist revival. Between the middle of the 18^th century and the middle of the 19^th, Wales experienced some fifteen major revivals.

In 1878, a coal miner and his wife welcomed their second son, Evan Roberts. A devout child, he attended church regularly and memorized scripture at night. From age 11 to 23, he worked in the coal mines with his father, then became a blacksmith's apprentice. His faith-walk deepened as he spent long hours of prayer. He began studying for the ministry and had a vision of “all Wales being lifted up to God.” In late 1904 he preached at his home chapel, then taking his message to other parts of Wales. Soon thousands attended the meetings. He believed God would give him 100,000 souls.

Wales began to change. Sporting events (particularly the nation's passion, rugby) drew fewer crowds, church more. Hundreds would come to church if it was even rumored that he would preach. Unlike the typical fiery evangelists or structured delivery of Welsh preachers, Roberts' preaching style was prayerful and reflective. At the end, he'd invite the audience to participate in sharing their experience with the Holy Spirit. Services went late into the night.

A HEART-MOVING HYMN

One revival meeting drew 18-year-old Annie Davies, also daughter of a coal miner and a trained singer, who experienced a deepening of her faith. At a subsequent service, invited to come to the platform to sing, she chose a song that had recently been on her heart: “Here is love vast as the ocean.” Overcome with emotion, tear-faced, she couldn't finish it that night. But she would continue to sing it at future meetings, joined by other young women, including her sister. The women also sang at local pubs, inviting men drinking there to come to the revival meetings.

Wales changed in that brief year of Roberts' preaching. Churches reported 80,000 more attending. Drunkenness and beer sales faded. People strove to be more honest, repaying their debts. At the mines, the pit ponies which dragged coal-laden wagons to the surface, were confused when their usually foul-mouthed handlers stopped using obscenities to order them around.

Roberts became front-page news. The revival was intense and exhausting, and after about a year in the public eye, Roberts experienced a physical and emotional collapse and had to quit. He went to England to recuperate, later returning to Cardiff to live quietly, appearing at a few meetings. He never married, dying at 72 in 1951.

Two decades ago, the 100^th anniversary of the Welsh Revival brought his story to light again, and also reintroduced his meetings' theme song about God's love, sung simply by young women who loved Jesus.

The hymn was composed by William Reese (1802-1883) and translated to English by William Edwards (1848-1929). It was sung with two tunes. One was “Ebenezer” with its rolling, wave-like rhythms (now used for the hymn “Oh the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”). Most hymnals now use a tune by prolific American composer Robert Lowry (1826-1899).

The full English lyrics are here: Here Is Love > Lyrics | William Rees (timelesstruths.org)

A moving performance of the hymn by Welsh tenor Huw Priday is here: 

Here is Love vast as the Ocean - Bing video

Harvest of righteousness

 
Rolling wheat fields mark much of the land alongside the highway we take to visit our daughter. As we drove past harvesters in action recently, I noticed the conditions of fields. Some had green weeds poking up through the grain.  Others were free of intruders. I remember hearing of how my late Uncle Pete, a drylands farmer in eastern Montana some sixty years ago, took pride in crops that were weed-free, meaning a lot of hands-on work to pluck out the intruders.
 

As I admired the undulating golden hills, I thought of the Bible’s many references to harvest, particularly James 3.  Throughout this letter, James urges believers to make sure their walk matches their talk.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.
James said the believer’s walk should have no room for the “weeds” of envy or selfish ambition, which feed into disorder and “every evil practice” (v. 17). Here’s what a believer’s life should “grow”:
But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.  Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness. (vv. 17-18)

Sometimes it’s easier to understand those traits by naming what they are not. One of the “keepers” in my personal library is The Calvary Road by Roy Hession, published in 1950 by Christian Literature Crusade. In his passion for revival in the church, Hession names sins of the “self-life” that we need to ask Christ to cleanse from our lives. They include self-energy, self-complacency in service, self-pity, self-seeking, self-indulgence, self-consciousness and “self” behaviors like touchiness, resentment, worry and fear. Christ can’t fill with His living water a “dirty cup” fouled by such sins. Revival comes with cleansing.

However you see it—a weeded wheat field, or a washed-clean cup—I can’t have that “harvest of righteousness” without honest self-examination and confession. It’s God’s way, and the best way.