Here I Raise My Ebenezer

There is a hymn that I really love: Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.  To me it is in elegant song and a triumphant song.  "Here I raise my ebenezer..." 

An ebenezer is a monument.  It is a memorial.  Remember the stone memorials that Moses left to remind those who had been there and those who would come...God has been here and He did this. 

Prayer is an ebenezer...a monument to God.  We are told to ask.  We have not because we ask not.  So, we ask.  Often, in the asking, we have in mind that the answer will be in such and such a way.  God doesn't usually answer in a way that meets our expectations...God's ways are not man's ways the scripture says. 

We have to be peaceful with God's answers.  This working its way through our life and manifesting in our lives, is an ebenezer.  Our lives become living monuments in our wilderness wanderings.  Doesn't that just feel good.  We all want to do something significant.  We want to leave something that means something to those who come behind.

I do a lot of emotional and spiritual healing work with people.  With God's help, yesterday, I helped someone rid themselves of the disempowering pain of rape.  She has been carrying this thirty or so years.   

The difference between how she looked and how she stand was like night and day.  When she came in she wouldn't even look me in the eyes.  Her color was sallow.  When she left she was walking tall and the color in her face was returning.  She could look you in your eyes and talk.  Her friend who came with her hugged me and said that she is totally different. 

She is an ebenezer that I get to leave along this journey.  God touched someone with healing because I was on the planet yesterday.   

All of us can touch others with healing.  God has touched us...giving us victory and healing.  We are His monuments...the evidence of what He has done for each of us is on display for the universe. 

Never think that your life is small and has no meaning.  The whole universe is looking on.  We are "active" monuments, living monuments.  As such, we can touch the lives of others.  The impact for good is amazing. 

1. Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount, I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

2. Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I'll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

3. Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

4. O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

5. O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothèd then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.