2020 certainly feels like a dark year. What do we have to be thankful for? Common grace and saving grace are two places to begin. Revelation 16 gives us a glimpse of what losing the first would look like, and 16:17 gives us a glimpse of how to find the second. The Lord bless and keep you in the face of Armageddon - which is actually a word of GOOD news for the Christian!
Music Today: "Land of the Living" by Matthew Perryman Jones.One of the most beautifully evocative songs I know calling someone to leave the false hopes of Babylon for the city of our true love and true home. 'You cannot love in moderation/dancing with a dead man's bones/lay your soul on the threshing floor.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP1m28ALWT4
'You Want it Darker' by Leonard CohenNeither of these songs are hymns or praise songs, necessarily, but it's hard to define this as anything other than a Christian confession, written only weeks before Cohen's death in 2016. Cohen was famously decadent in the '60s, '70s, and '80s at least, but, like Bob Dylan, had biblical and Christ haunted lyrics occasionally peeking out of even his earliest music. His last three recordings show this spiritual wanderer moving more and more directly to the cross of Jesus Christ. The key word 'Hineni' here is Jewish for 'Here I Am.' Many of his late songs describe a despair that a life without God can lead to.