I’ve been exploring some of the very modern worship songs as an old guy 😀. But now, I’ve decided to alternate between very modern hymns, old hymns, and in-between hymns, namely the worship songs from the 60s to the 90s that feature in hymnbooks such as Mission Praise. Today it’s the turn of the old hymns.
Today’s song is Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart from 1854.
1 Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
Wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art;
And make me love Thee as I ought to love.
2 I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.
3 Did you not bid us love you, God and King,
Love you with all our heart and strength and mind?
I see the cross— there teach my heart to cling.
O let me seek you and O let me find!
4 Teach me to feel that you are always nigh;
Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear,
To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh;
Teach me the patience of unceasing prayer.
5 Teach me to love you as your angels love,
One holy passion filling all my frame:
The fullness of the heaven-descended Dove;
My heart an altar, and your love the flame.
This one was written by George Croly (1780–1860), an Irish‑born Anglican priest, poet, and theologian. It always pleases me to find that a hymnwriter is Irish.
The New Testament makes the doctrine of the Trinity more explicit than the Old Testament does. The word “Trinity” isn’t used, but it’s clear that there’s only one God and that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Some in the early centuries of the Christian church mistakenly believed that one person appears in three roles, but the early church corrected that because in the New Testament, they interact with each other. God is plural. Perhaps we wouldn’t make God plural if we were inventing Him, but then again, love is such a central theme in creation that it shouldn’t surprise us to know that before anything was created, love existed within God.
Yet, generally speaking, we’re encouraged to pray to God the Father through Jesus. And the Holy Spirit works in our hearts. He draw us to prayer and He assists us in prayer and in all sorts of other ways. God is, and always has been, everywhere, but He manifests His presence in particular ways at specific times and places. For example, before Jesus died, rose, and ascended into heaven, He promised to send the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t that the Holy Spirit wasn’t already everywhere, but He manifested Himself in new ways. In the Old Testament, He occasionally manifested Himself to individuals. In the New Testament, on the day of Pentecost, He descended on the whole church. Later, we see public manifestations as the gospel spread through Samaria and to the Gentiles. And throughout History, He sometimes works in special ways through revivals, but He works in all of us. Without Him, we might have no interest in the truth. We might be religious, but it would be a religion of our own choosing or invention.
John 14:15-17
15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
So the Holy Spirit is in us when we come to Christ. But why do we ask Him to descend upon our hearts, and why do we pray to Him? Some versions of the hymn have the first line as “Spirit of God who lives within our hearts”, rather than “descend upon our hearts”. But I don’t worry about the details. We think of God as being outside our experience. Jesus ascended into heaven physically. Why didn’t He just disappear? I think it’s just God’s way of translating spiritual things into the way we think. We naturally think of God’s dwelling place as far away geographically. So, we think in terms of the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, as He did with Jesus. And He also descended on the church at Pentecost and descended on groups on several occasions in the Book of Acts.
Likewise, when we pray, we often think of heaven as geographically at some distance. When I pray “Our Father who art in heaven”, I could think of the Father as being right next to me, but I don’t. He’s far above and beyond my experience, though he’s only a prayer away.
Anyway, isn’t the pattern to pray to the Father rather than to the Holy Spirit or Jesus, as in the “Our Father”. Yes, but both the Holy Spirit and Jesus are with us, and it’s perfectly natural to speak to them both and to worship them as God. But the nature of our prayers might depend on who we’re praying to. For example, I’ve never heard anyone converting the “Our Father” to the “Our Jesus”, but you do sometimes get people praying to Jesus as if He’s the Father. Surely, it’s better to say something like, “Thank you for laying down your life for me.” or “Please make me more aware of your presence with me”. But generally, we pray to the Father in the name of Jesus.
I think that hymns help us to see the sorts of things that we could be saying to Jesus and to the Holy Spirit.
Just this morning I found the subject of praying to the Holy Spirit discussed in the Ask NT Wright podcasts. It’s one of several questions put to this Anglican evangelical New Testament scholar in the episode. I’ll copy the video at the point at which the question begins.
Here are some other performances of today’s hymn:
Hibernia Gospel 