This is the 3rd week of our Advent and Christmas series based on the Charles Wesley hymn, “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”
We are looking at different phrases from that hymn during this series. We can learn a lot about our faith through these great hymns. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it can be easy to sleep-walk when we sing hymns, forgetting to appreciate their lyrics.
Brothers, John and Charles Wesley were 18th century Anglican Priests in the Church of England and they were the ones who founded the Methodist movement within the Anglican Church. John and Charles Wesley were seeking to reform the Church of England by encouraging people inside and outside the church to grow in their faith through small groups or classes as they called them.
John was more of the preacher and organizer of the Methodist movement in helping to get these classes started and Charles was the musician and hymn writer. Together, they were able to offer powerful leadership for this new spiritual movement.
Charles contribution was to write new hymns for those early Methodists that would help them to sing their faith. In fact, Charles Wesley ended up writing a staggering 6,000 hymns in his lifetime.
Our worship hymnal is filled with several of Charles Wesley hymns. I looked up how many Charles Wesley hymns we have in our hymnal because I’m such a Christian nerd. Of the 677 hymns in our hymnal, 59 of them are by Charles Wesley. That’s almost 9% of the hymns in our hymnal.
I believe the person who has written the most hymns overall is Fanny Crosby. She lived about a hundred years after Charles Wesley and she wrote 9,000 hymns during her lifetime, about 3,000 more hymns than Charles. But we only have 7 of her hymns in our hymnal. The reason we have more Charles Wesley hymns is because the lyrics of his hymns are rooted in Methodist theology.
Hymns are wonderful ways for us to know and live out our faith. In most hymns, each verse builds upon the previous verse in describing the theological meaning that it is seeking to convey. And this is certainly true of “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”
As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago when we first began this series, this hymn by Charles Wesley is an Advent hymn which means that it is preparing us not only to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but it is also anticipating Jesus’ second coming when God will make all things new and where heaven and earth will be as one.
Listen again to the beginning of this wonderful Advent hymn:
“Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free.” “Born to set thy people free” is the phrase that we are invited to focus on this week.
Notice Charles Wesley’s creative poetry that repeats the word, “born” several times in these two verses. “Born to set thy people free,” is what we sing at the beginning of verse 1. And then he creatively uses that word three more times in verse 2. Listen to verse 2. “Born thy people to deliver, born a child and yet a king,born to reign in us for forever.”
Charles Wesley is taking a word that is closely associated with Christmas, the birth of Christ, and then using it to show what this good news means for us. Jesus’ birth is meant to set thy people free.
Free from what? He goes on to write in verse 1, “Free from our fears and sins release us.”
Let’s first focus on our fears. What fears might keep us from being set free?
When Penny and I hosted the McDowell family reunion this past summer, I put together a video documentary on the history of our last name. The last name, “McDowell” which is derived from the name, “Dougal” was originated during the 14thcentury in southwest Scotland.
The McDowell family crest is a lion symbolizing deathless courage which is kind of ironic since I’m afraid of spiders, snakes, heights, sounds during the night, and even my own shadow. But I know I’m not alone. We all have our share of fears regardless of our last names.
Notice in this hymn, Charles Wesley refers to Israel in the Old Testament and their longing for that time in the future when God would come to set them free. One of the major story lines in the Old Testament is this longing of Israel to be set free from foreign oppression.
Early in the Old Testament we read how the people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt and then Moses rescued them and brought them to the Promised Land. God had set them free.
Even though they did experience some years of peace and prosperity during the monarchy, they ended up dividing as a nation following King Solomon’s death. This made both of those divided nations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south very vulnerable to the invasion of the surrounding empires.
The northern kingdom of Israel was eventually taken over by the Assyrian Empire and the southern kingdom suffered the same fate by the Babylonian Empire. Around 600 years before the time of Christ’s birth, the Babylonian Empire destroyed the city of Jerusalem and their Temple and forced the people of God into exile for the next several decades.
That was a very fearful time for God’s people. Even when the people were finally able to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple, they were still fearful of their future. And then at the time of Jesus’ birth, the Roman Empire was now in control of Israel. Jesus was born during another time of great fear and anxiety.
This is what makes this first part of Charle’s Wesley hymn so powerful because it boldly says, “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us.”
Fears and sins are why we often feel like we are in bondage. Our fears can rob us of the freedom God intends for us.
This makes me think of when the angels came to visit the shepherds on that first Christmas Eve to announce to them that a Savior has been born in Bethlehem. When the angels told them this, we are told that the shepherds were terrified. They were filled with fear.
And then the angels told them, “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
And after the shepherds went and saw that what the angels had told them was true, that Mary gave birth to Jesus, the Savior of the world, we are told that they returned to their fields praising God. Their fear turned into praise. This is what Jesus does for us. Jesus sets us free from our fears!
There is so much fear in this world. We are afraid of so many things, but the good news of Christmas is that God is more than able to set us free from our fears.
Maybe you have discovered this as well. Whenever I am anxious and fearful about facing a difficult situation or the unknown, more times than not, it rarely turns out as bad as I was fearing it could have been. My own fears can make things worse.
One of the ways that we can live out this line in the hymn in being set free from our fears is by remembering that Christmas is about God becoming one with us. I think of Mary and Joseph and the fears they had leading up to Jesus’ birth.
Mary had to face the fear of what other people would say about her as a young girl who was pregnant and her husband who wasn’t the biological father.
Joseph had to face the fear of what people would say about him by not leaving Mary because she was pregnant. And they both had to face the fear of not being able to find a suitable place for Mary to give birth since they were in Bethlehem and a long way from home.
So many fears. So many anxieties. But during that very fearful time, Mary and Joseph also were clinging to the hope and good news that the baby they were about to have would become the Savior of the world. This is what helped them to overcome their fears.
Think about all the fears that God is wanting us to hand over so that we can experience the freedom and the joy that God wants us to have. There are times in our lives where we have every reason to be fearful but we also have every reason to remember that God is with us through anything we face.
It doesn’t mean that with Jesus in our lives, our lives will be easy. It does mean that with God, our fears can be released as this hymns says so beautifully.
This hymn also mentions being set free from our sins. In addition to our fears, our sins and brokenness can keep us from being free as well.
One of the best things that we do every Sunday during worship is when we pray the prayer of confession together and then hear those priceless words at the end of that prayer. “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” And then we all say together, “Thanks be to God!”
I can’t think of a more important line to hear each week than this one! “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!” Now, in my mind, I know that if I confess my sins, God forgives me, but it also really helps when I hear all of us say those words together.
These prayers of confession that we say each week are written in such a way that we can each find ourselves somewhere in that prayer where we acknowledge that we have sinned against God and are in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. After we hear those words of forgiveness, I always feel a sigh of relief, knowing that God’s grace is greater than my sin.
When God sent Jesus to be born and then to live among us and die on a cross for the sins of the world, and rise to new life, he did for us what we were unable to do for ourselves, free us from our sins. As we sing in another one of Charles Wesley’s hymns, “He breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the prisoner free!”
A pastor friend of mine shared that he was talking one day with a guy who spent fifteen years in prison. For the first few years in jail, he denied any wrong doing. Be he found Christ while in prison and he became a changed man.
This guy said to my friend, “I finally got honest with myself and God that I had a problem and had done wrong and that was a major factor in helping me to be a new person.”
Christ can set us free from our sins. We don’t need to pretend that we are something we’re not. We are all broken people. We all fall short. Confessing our sins opens up the opportunity for us to receive God’s mercy and grace anew. What a wonderful thing about our faith! God wants to deliver us from our sins.
In one of the churches I served, a man came to our church during the week and asked if I would pray with him. He said that he wanted to know if his sins could be forgiven. I can tell that he was very troubled by whatever he had done.
He said that to the best of his ability he had been trying to make up for the bad things that he had done and to be a better human being, but he still didn’t feel forgiven by God. We then talked a lot about how Jesus died on the cross for all of our sins and brokenness and that nobody is perfect.
And then I invited him to close our time together by going into the sanctuary with me to pray and receive God’s forgiveness and grace. I’ll never forget his response. He said, “I can’t go in the sanctuary, can I? I’m not wearing nice enough clothes.”
I assured him that God sees beyond what we are wearing and focuses only on what is in our hearts. So he agreed and we went into the empty sanctuary and prayed together and I made sure to conclude that prayer with the words, “Your sins are forgiven. Thanks be to God!”
I sometimes wonder if that man was ever able to receive the good news of this Charles Wesley hymn, “Come, thou long-expected Jesus, born to set thy people free, from our fears and sins release us.”
I sure hope that he has found his rest in thee which is the next line in the hymn, but we’ll save that for next Sunday.
Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus! Born to Set Thy People Free
O God of Peace, come. Form us into your peace-makers. Enable us to look within ourselves, to make straight our crooked hearts, to patiently and lovingly await changes in ourselves and others. As you gather us tenderly and hold us close, may we also show that same compassion to the world. Fill our hearts with your peace and our lives with your love, that these may flow from our lives and into our world. We ask this through Christ, our Savior and our peace, Amen.
L: In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.
P: In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.
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