Dear Harmony Plains Singing School friends,
Here we are planning and anticipating Harmony Plains Singing School 2019. The dates are Sunday evening the 21st through Friday evening the 26th of July. Life’s joys are many, and one of them is spending a week with each of you. Our Lord is so good to each of us, yet since last year no doubt each one has had trials as well as triumphs. The sustaining truth and blessing though is that our Father guides, sustains, and upholds us in prayer.
If we look at the passage on prayer in Ephesians 1:15-23, we see how Paul prayed for those he loved. In verse 17, he writes, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.”
It is amazing that Paul’s prayer contains no request for changes in circumstances. They faced persecution, death, oppression, separation from loved ones, and their existence was meager and unsafe compared to ours, yet in this prayer we don’t see one petition for a better king, for protection from roaming bands of terrorists, or for bread for their next meal. Paul did not pray for the goods we usually have at the top of our list.
It is not wrong to pray for such things; Jesus himself invites us to ask for “daily bread,” and Paul taught us to pray for all in authority in I Timothy 2. In Ephesians 1, though, Paul reveals what he asked most frequently for his friends and what he believed was most important for them.
Paul prays, “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints” (Ephesians 1:18). To have the “eyes of your understanding enlightened,” means to have truth known so deeply it grips your whole person.
Paul wants the Spirit to grasp them with all the past, present, and future riches they have in Christ. Of course, we know about these benefits in our minds, but the prayer is that we would be grasped with a keen sense of the reality of God, identity in Christ, and a unity in the Spirit.
Paul sees this deep knowledge of who God is and who we are in Him as a more critical thing to receive than a change of circumstances. Without this powerful sense of God’s reality, good circumstances can lead to overconfidence and spiritual blasé, and difficult circumstances can lead to doubt and debilitation.
Knowing God more fully is what we must have above all if we are to face life in any circumstances. Paul’s concern is for public and private prayer life to reach its highest good in knowing God’s love for us, Christ’s sacrifice for us, and for communion with the Spirit. A rich, vibrant, consoling prayer life makes it possible to receive good things thankfully and beneficially, but also to endure difficult and exhausting things faithfully.
Our 2019 theme is “The Greatness of Prayer”. Our 2019 text is Ephesians 1:15-23.
Our theme song for 2019, written by Sonny Lowrance, is #422 in the Primitive Baptist Hymnal:
- Jesus Christ our loving friend On whom our hopes of Heav’n depend,
Hear us when we cry to Thee, Author of our liberty. - When at Thy throne we try to pray, These precious tho’ts our words convey:
From Thine embrace we cannot fall; Thou are our life, our all in all. - Now in this hour we need Thy love, Thy blessings straight from Heav’n above
That we, so hungry, may be fed With truths of life, our daily bread.
In Christ alone,
Brother Dickie