Kristyn Getty: Your Best Thought Ordering All Other Thoughts

The following is by Kristyn Getty, posted on the Getty Music Facebook Page on Monday, December 28, 2015


‘Thou my best thought by day or by night
Waking or sleeping Thy presence, my light’
(from the hymn Be Thou My Vision).

A few weeks ago in church we sang one of my favorites, the old Irish hymn ‘Be Thou my Vision’. I’ve known this text all my life but a line jumped out at me as if I’d never heard it before – Thou my best thought, by day or by night.

My brain has been so cluttered of late, very busy and extremely sleep deprived but this lyric cut through the noise pulsing through my head. It is hard especially with young children to reign your thoughts into their rightful order. Everything becomes meshed together and it’s easy to let smaller things become the main things.

“Should I buy organic or regular ‘toxic’ bananas or is it enough to just get the milk that’s organic?!! And how do I get Charlotte to stop eating her toothpaste especially if all she had for dinner was ketchup and the breading round the chicken?! Is Grace eating enough, sleeping enough, warm enough, enough, enough, enough…? These kids are growing up too fast, don’t grow up too fast…How will I get Eliza to listen first time? How are Keith and I going to settle on the right schedule?”

The day can be quickly filled with all of these intense thoughts, the worries, the fears, the laughs, the tears…sandwiched between the scary news headlines that pop up on Facebook and the ‘we need to do better at getting to church on time’ talk and then here we are on another heaven sent Sunday standing with little Gracie in my arms and I hear:

‘Thou my best thought by day or by night’

A window opens in my soul and

fresh air blows in;
everything becomes rightly reshuffled,
relief follows,
the bullies of worry and fear are quietened

and joy unleashes my heart to sing to the great unchangeable all wise God who loves us, and is in control of all things and has blessed us abundantly in Christ.

As we consider a new year, all our goals and all our plans, it is good to remember that He is our best thought and makes sense and order of all others.


Learn more about Keith and Kristyn Getty at www.gettymusic.com.

Strongly Theological Christmas Content at the NY Times & Washington Post

Yes, Virginia, there is a media bias against orthodox Christianity (especially at Christmas and Easter), but it was tempered somewhat this year by the publication of strongly theological content in opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Granted the pieces were written by conservatives with ties to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but those connections do not diminish from the fact that newspapers widely reputed for their anti-conservative bias published the pieces. In fact, those connections ought to have made it less likely the pieces would be published, in light of conservative portrayals of the main stream media as hopelessly biased.

From Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:

Modern people, surrounded by violence and oppression, presented with morally conflicted choices, do not need an ethical system. They need hope. And that sets a limit on our own effort. “A prison cell like this,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

In the Christian view, the door was swung open by the incarnation, by a God who somehow became a defenseless child, a refugee, a teacher of good, a victim of injustice, left alone, tired, in doubt, to face a humiliating death. A God who — strangely, paradoxically, mysteriously — at the end felt abandoned by God. A God on our side. “God wants to always be with us,” Bonhoeffer said, “wherever we may be — in our sin, in our suffering and death. We are no longer alone: God is with us. We are no longer homeless; a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us.”

This, despite all our fears and doubts, is Christmas: a God secretly revealed as love.

From Pete Wehner in the New York Times:

Because the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions. It was through this story of divine enfleshment that much of our humanistic tradition was born.

For most Christians, the incarnation — the belief that God, in the person of Jesus, walked in our midst — is history’s hinge point. The incarnation’s most common theological take-away relates to the doctrine of redemption: the belief that salvation is made possible by the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Preaching and Modern Translations of the Bible

The business of preaching, after all, is to explain the message of the word. I maintain that that can only be done by preaching.

Now today, you see, because people don’t believe in preaching, they believe in new translations of the Bible. Have you ever thought that that was their main reason for all their excitement about new translations? It’s because they don’t believe in preaching.

What’s the argument for the new translations, any one of them? They say people no longer understand the Authorized Version, and the Revised is very similar. They say we knew they don’t understand these terms: justification, sanctification, and so on. We need now a new translation in which these terms will be put in a form that the modern man can understand. So they drop those terms, and propitiation and others, and they put it in terms of being delivered, they drop any idea of ransoming and things like that, and they use some very general terms about liberation and freedom and things like that; and they really believe that men and women now understand the truth. And there is one of the greatest dangers, as I see it, in the present religious situation.

These great terms like justification and sanctification, glorification, and many others – propitiation, and so on, I argue and maintain, cannot be presented simply by alternative translations. They are terms that have to be expounded. They are terms that have to be illustrated. What your modern translations are doing is to evacuate the terms of their real meaning. It is only the preacher who can really show the profound content of the terms. That is why preaching is absolutely essential!

You can’t get a single term to explain propitiation. You can’t get a single term to explain justification, nor sanctification. These terms must be worked out, they must be drawn out, they must be explained and expounded by the preacher; and alternative translations cannot do it. They are not doing so. They are indeed ultimately, so many of them, standing between the people and the real meaning of the terms.

I support this argument, of course, by again appealing to history. Men have never understood these terms. Even men and women, 200 years ago, before there was popular education, under the inspired preaching of people like Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the rest  were given an understanding – through the preaching – of the meaning of these great and glorious terms, and thereby through them, and by means of them, were led to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour and Redeemer.

The Book of Romans: Why Preaching?
Volume 10 — #3255 — Romans 10:14-17
February 28, 1964