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Jesus shall reign wherever the sun
does its successive journeys run,
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more
To him shall endless prayer be made,
and praises throng to crown his head.
His name like sweet perfume shall rise
With every morning sacrifice
People and realms of every tongue
dwell on his love with sweetest song,
and infant voices shall proclaim
their early blessings on his name.
Blessings abound wherever he reigns;
the prisoners leap to lose their chains,
the weary find eternal rest,
and all who suffer want are blest.
Let every creature rise and bring
the highest honors to our King,
angels descend with songs again,
and earth repeat the loud amen.
Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun (from 28 Hymns to Sing Before You Die, by John M Mulder with Meditations by F. Morgan Roberts, pp. 58-63) SING HYMN #265
Issac Watts wrote this hymn, including it in the 1719 entitled Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. The hymnbook, he said, gave “an evangelic turn to the Hebrew sense” and was designed to “accommodate the book of Psalms to Christian worship.” In other words, these were hymns that imitated the Psalms.
“Jesus Shall Reign” comes from the second part of Psalm 72.
It became an unofficial hymn for the missionary movement, which had an enormous impact in making Christianity a world religion for the first time in 2,000 years. For example, by the early twenty-first century there were nearly twice as many Christians in Asia as in North America and almost three times as many Christians in Africa than in the United States.
By the end of the twentieth century, the numerical strength of the Christian faith had dramatically moved away from the Western world to the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, largely because of the evangelistic activities of the indigenous churches. And yet, the gospel was planted by men and women who were Western missionaries, and much of the educational and medical programs in these areas are due in no small measure to the work of those ambassadors for Christ.
We pay special attention to the fourth stanza:
Blessings abound wherever he reigns;
the prisoners leap to lose their chains,
the weary find eternal rest,
and all who suffer want are blessed.
Today, when so many are in poverty, so many suffer from disease or famine, and so many afflicted in spirit, we sing and work with conviction that “all who suffer want are blessed.”
(Isn’t this the bottom line of Jesus’ parable today:
we shouldn’t keep blessings to ourselves,
we can’t put our abundance in the bank – or a silo –
we are asked to live richly, richly in God.
We must live listening to how God wants us to be.)
Let’s hear how F. Morgan Roberts muses about this hymn and his experience of our Presbyterian missionary experience.
(Meditation) Hopeful About Everybody
There have been great changes since Isaac Watts wrote this hymn that “became the unofficial hymn of the missionary movement.” The goal of saving souls accomplished much more than was first envisioned by those early missionaries who made heroic sacrifices lest even “one soul should perish, lost in shades of night.”
Those early heralds of the good news accomplished far more than they could have realized. Schools, hospitals, orphanages, and literacy were just a few of the blessings that came to “abound wher’er He reigns.” Even though their scope was narrow by today’s ecumenical emphases, within it they were magnificent.
They were sowing the seeds that moved the focus of the church’s mission from conversion to compassion. And from this widening focus, we can learn a lesson of tremendous personal significance for our daily lives. Whenever we remember throughout every ordinary day that Jesus shall reign, we need to recall that the victory of God’s kingdom has already been achieved.
From my boyhood days I remember General Douglas MacArthur’s dramatic radio broadcast to the Filipino people a few minutes after he and his troops had landed on the island of Leyte on October 29, 1944. His words, “I have returned” referred to the pledge (“I shall return”) he had made in 1942 when he had been ordered to leave his command post in the Philippines and retreat to Australia. But now, the march toward victory had begun.
Jesus has also landed, and his landing, his announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand, is without a breath of triumphalism and in an entirely peaceful spirit. Our dramatic announcement is that the King’s Son has landed to reclaim his Father’s lands and people. God’s invasion has begun; Jesus is peacefully invading every human life.
If we believe that, it will change the entire spirit with which we meet everyone on every day of our lives.
It will not mean that we live with the smug interior assurance that we’re right and they’re wrong. (Something like that smug rich farmer). We do not engage with others, saying within ourselves, “You just wait; you’ll have your comeuppance when Jesus returns.”
That’s not the spirit that rules our relationships with others when we sing, “Jesus Shall Reign.” Neither does it mean that we live with the guarantee that our theology, our denomination, or even that Christianity will win.
Let us be clear about that. Christianity is the organized institutional religion that has sought to carry the message and mission of Jesus into the world. But Christianity is not Jesus. And there have always been persons of good faith who, without becoming Christians, have believed in Jesus’ way of life – Gandhi, for example. So when we say that Jesus shall reign, we are not saying that the Christian church will win out and that everyone will convert to our faith.
What we are saying is that “every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” which is to acknowledge that Jesus’ life of love, peace, and compassion will be acknowledged as the goal of all human life. We don’t know how the millions of the world’s peoples will make their own unique expressions of their love for Jesus but we know that Jesus will never turn anyone away who seeks to follow his way of life.
Frank Laubach (1884-1970) said it best. Here was a missionary who embodied the changing mission emphasis from conversion to compassion. There are probably more people on the face of the earth today who can read and enjoy the blessings of his world literacy campaign.
A different kind of invasion began in 1915 when Frank Laubach and his wife arrived in the Philippines. His greatest challenge was that of somehow reaching the Muslim Moros on the island of Mindanao, a people who were virtually in accessible to approach by a Christian missionary. However, he came finally to the realization that his mission was not about religion but about life.
In his diary on March 9, 1930, he wrote, “I must confront these Moros with a divine love which will speak Christ to them though I never use his name…What right then have I or any other person to come here and change the name of these people from Muslim to Christian, unless I lead them to a life fuller of God than they have now? Clearly, clearly, my job here is not to go to the town plaza and make proselytes, it is to live wrapped in God, trembling to God’s thoughts, burning with God’s passion.”
I still remember the night when I first heard Laubach speak and talk of missions in this deeply living sense. I still have the little booklet of his letters I picked up that night, and I still have the letter he wrote to me six weeks before his death in which he closed by saying, “God give you a tremendous fire of the Spirit.”
It was his understanding of the Spirit’s working in every life that gave new hope to my life and ministry because I know that Jesus is somehow reigning and working in every life. I am hopeful about everyone I ever meet. However impossible they may seem (even if they look like enemies of Jesus), I know that they are precious to Jesus and that he will never give up on them.
It’s a great way to live. It’s the only way to live, because the lights of home, our eternal home, will always be burning
“Til angels descend with songs again,
and earth repeat the loud amen.”
May we have ears to hear, Alleluia, Amen.
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