Music just isn’t my thing. I don’t hear it like everyone else does. It hurts my ears and gives me a headache. So, of course, I married a musician who could play multiple instruments, who loves to sing and who enjoys music played at the loudest volume possible. But, I still appreciate many hymns, both traditional and contemporary. I love the words. I like looking up the stories of the song writers and what inspired them to write their beautiful words. Still, I prefer to read the lyrics like a poem rather hear them set to music.

            Oddly, when I was younger I could sing a little. My right ear picks up the right note and I sing that note. As I have gotten older and I sing less and less, my voice has suffered, but that is not important to me. Back in the day, though, someone would occasionally ask me to sing a particular song. This didn’t always turn out well, but not for lack of practice. I did try. The results were not always good, but I tried.

            One day, an older lady in the church came up to and requested that I sing “Jesus is the Lighthouse.” This a song written by a teenaged boy named Ronnie Hinson in the restroom of a church called The Pentecostal Tabernacle somewhere in California, during a break in rehearsal for an upcoming Gospel concert he and his brothers and sister were going to give. Hinson wanted to be alone to think and he went to the restroom to do that. The song, called simply, “The Lighthouse,” was written on a roll of toilet paper. You use what you have to use. When he returned to sanctuary his brother took the manuscript and wrote the music in about five minutes. Thus was born a song, written in 1970, that is beloved by many.

           I never liked the song. Much of it is Biblically wrong. Lighthouses existed in Biblical times and were in use more then than now, yet Jesus was never compared to a lighthouse. A lighthouse warns ships away from the shore. Jesus draws people in to the Kingdom. The common thought of people who have never relied on a lighthouse, or a lighted buoy, is that the lighthouse draws the mariner to the shore. The opposite is true. The lighthouse was placed on a treacherous shore, filled with jagged rocks and unpredictable currents, too warn that mariner off. Calling Jesus the lighthouse is saying that Jesus is pushing us away, rather than drawing us to Him.

            The lady was insistent. She wanted me to sing the song. I finally agreed. I knew Marsha had it on cassette tape somewhere with the words, so I just let it go, figuring I would get it out the Saturday before the Sunday I was going to sing it and go over the song. It never pays to procrastinate.

            That Saturday morning I started looking for the song and couldn’t find it. Finally, I asked Marsha and she went right to where it lay. Should have asked her in the first place. But, there was a problem. No lyrics. All I had was a performance tape with no words to sing. Now it would be no problem. Just type the name of the song into the internet and you would have a half dozen YouTube videos, ads for where you could buy pictures of lighthouses and pages where you could just get the lyrics. Sadly, however, this was at the time that dinosaurs ruled the earth. The internet was something almost no one had heard about. So, what do I do now? A call to the local Bible bookstore revealed that no copies existed in the store. I was running out of options.

            So, I rewrote the song. New lyrics, Biblically correct and the same old tune. That’s the way I sang it. After church the lady came up to me. I expected to get pounded on pretty hard. “Pastor Wade, thank you for singing that song. That second verse has always spoken to me!” Off she went. Now, the second verse I sang bore no resemblance to the verse she had heard before. Other than the music, it was totally different.

           I know, most of you think I am pretty picky. It is the thought behind a song that makes it precious. In my mind, though, I always think what a lost person might get out of a song. Granted, today most people, the born again and the lost, think of a lighthouse as a herald of safety rather than the harbinger of danger, so the song might impact a lost person in a positive manner, as well. It is still not correct. Which is also the reason there are several Christmas carols I don’t like. Another story for another time.

            If, however, you like the imagery of the song, I have one for you that is far more lovely. Philip Bliss was one of the greatest Christian musicians of the 1800s. He was, for several years until his death in a train wreck, the musician/singer for D.L. Moody and his evangelistic crusades. We all know and love the great hymns by Fanny Crosby, but she was mostly a poet. Philip Bliss wrote the music to a lot of her poems.

            Bliss was on a ship bound for Scotland and he was on the deck early in the morning before daybreak as the ship neared the harbor. The lighthouse was shining its light across the sea and Bliss knew that it meant danger. But the ship continued to make its way in the darkness without slowing down. Nervously, he stopped a deckhand as he walked by and asked the young man if the ship should be slowing down for safety sake. The lighthouse was close by. The deckhand laughed and told Bliss that they were following the lower lights. These were the lights that lined the harbor. The houses and pubs and harbor houses and such businesses as would be open at that hour. The lighthouse warned, he was told, but each one of the lower lights played their part in bringing them to safe harbor. Greatly moved buy this, he wrote a great Christian song. Not great for its popularity, for it is hardly popular. But great for its picture of what each Christian should be doing.

Let the Lower Lights Be Burning

Brightly beams our Father’s mercy,
From His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping
Of the lights along the shore.

o   Refrain:
Let the lower lights be burning!
Send a gleam across the wave!
Some poor struggling, fainting seaman
You may rescue, you may save.

Dark the night of sin has settled,
Loud the angry billows roar;
Eager eyes are watching, longing,
For the lights along the shore.

Trim your feeble lamp, my brother;
Some poor sailor, tempest-tossed,
Trying now to make the harbor,
In the darkness may be lost.

            We are the ‘lower lights’ showing the way.

            Blessings