By the Lord’s design and according to the Lord’s will, Christian churches regularly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. In the 20th century, it was common for church members to find this being offered only once each quarter, just four times a year. By the 21st century, it was not unusual to find the Lord’s Supper once a month, or sometimes even each week. This has happened, not just because of a desire to imitate the practice of the early church with frequent observation of the Lord’s Supper. More often, it came about as a result of the very real spiritual benefit it brings to believers (as the Lord intended), and therefore a desire to make that available to church members more often than just once every three or four months.
However often a local church might observe the Lord’s Supper, hopefully many will recognize that the first Sunday in October is known as World Communion Sunday. This was first observed in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was initiated there by Rev. Hugh Thomson Kerr to unite Christian churches through a shared celebration of Communion. It was adopted by the Federal Council of Churches in 1940 and became a worldwide event. Today it is observed by churches of most major denominations. It provides an opportunity for believers around the globe to have a sense of oneness in Christ that stretches across many cultural, geographic, language, and even doctrinal barriers.
Whenever the sacrament is observed, all hymnals provide rich musical resources for people to be focused that day on what Jesus accomplished for us in His atoning death. Some of those will be in the hymnal section on the Lord’s Supper. Others will be found in the topical section on the suffering and death of Christ. Since this historical event is such a central matter in the Christian faith, these are hymns with which a congregation should be familiar and with which there should be an ongoing effort to increase familiarity with this repertoire.
Among those communion hymns that are very helpful is this one, “According to Thy Gracious Word,” written in 1825 by the Scottish hymnwriter James Montgomery (1771-1854). He was the orphaned child of Moravians living in Scotland. From a young age he showed a passion for writing epic poetry and novels, with many volumes of his own poems having been printed. But his best work was in the writing of hymns. His work is well represented in most hymnals. Among the 400 or so that he wrote, some of the most enduring are “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” “Stand Up and Bless the Lord,” “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed,” “In the Hour of Trial,” and “God Is My Strong Salvation.”
His parents died on a West Indies mission field while he was in boarding school. Montgomery inherited a strong religious bent, a passion for missions, and an independent mind. He was editor of the “Sheffield Iris” (1796-1827), a newspaper that sometimes espoused radical causes. Montgomery was imprisoned briefly when he printed a song that celebrated the fall of the Bastille and again when he described a riot in Sheffield that reflected unfavorably on a military commander. He also protested against slavery, the lot of boy chimney sweeps, and lotteries. Associated with Christians of various persuasions, Montgomery supported missions and the British Bible Society. He published eleven volumes of poetry, mainly his own, and at least four hundred hymns. Some critics judge his hymn texts to be equal in quality to those of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley.
His father, John Montgomery, was a Moravian pastor, apparently the only Moravian pastor serving in Scotland at the time. Montgomery’s parents felt a call to serve as missionaries on the island of Barbados, West Indies, in the Caribbean. When James was only five years old, his parents departed for the West Indies, leaving James with a Moravian group in County Antrim, Ireland. His parents died in the West Indies a few years later, so James never saw them again. In 1776 he had moved with his parents to the Moravian Settlement at Gracehill, near Ballymena, county of Antrim. Two years afterward he was sent to the Fulneck Seminary, Yorkshire. He left Fulneck in 1787, and entered a retail shop at Mirfield, near Wakefield.
Soon tiring of that, he entered upon a similar situation at Wath, near Rotherham, only to find it quite as unsuitable to his taste as the former. A journey to London, with the hope of finding a publisher for his youthful poems ended in failure. In 1792 he was glad to leave Wath for Shefield to join Mr. Gales, an auctioneer, bookseller, and printer of the “Sheffield Register” newspaper, as his assistant. In 1794 Mr. Gales left England to avoid a political prosecution. Montgomery took the “Sheffield Register”in hand, changed its name to “The Sheffield Iris,”and continued to edit it for thirty-one years.
This communion hymn of Montgomery’s is noticeable for its repetition, at the end of each stanza, of the meaning of Jesus’ words to the disciples in the Upper Room, “This do in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19). What Montgomery has done is to take that commandment of Jesus and make it the basis of our promise to the Lord as we come to, and depart from, the Lord’s Table, assuring Him that we will indeed remember Him. What sorts of things should we remember. Here are six suggestions.
First, we should remember who He is. He is the Lamb of God, the divine second person of the Holy Trinity, the one who has existed at the right hand of the Father in perfect loving fellowship from eternity. He is the one in whom all the fullness of deity dwells, the one who sits on the throne of the universe, the one to whom the Father has given all authority in heaven and on earth, the one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord.
Second, we should remember what He has taught us through His three years of public ministry during His incarnation. We have the record of Jesus’ teaching through His miracles and parables spread throughout the four Gospels. And His teaching as our great prophet continues now through His written word as the Holy Spirit plants those truths within us, changing who we are, how we think, and what we do.
Third, we should remember what He did, as He took the guilt of our sins to the cross and paid in full the penalty we owed to the righteousness of God. In doing so, he became the propitiation that bore the wrath of God in our place, and removed our guilt in the wonder of expiation, separating our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. By His sovereign will and work He has made us who were dead in our sins to be alive, and has adopted us as children of the heavenly Father.
Fourth, we should remember what He is doing right now as He is seated at the right hand of the Father. He is interceding for us night and day, commissioning His Holy Spirit to advance the work of sanctification in our hearts, enabling us to be His instruments. He is advancing His kingdom with such power that the gates of hell will not be able to prevail against it. That includes His ruling over the kings and parliaments and armies of the world, despite present appearances, so that all are His instruments to accomplish His ultimate goal of eternal universal dominance and victory.
Fifth, we should remember what He promised in accomplishing our redemption. He promised that nothing would ever separate us from His love, that He would be with us to the end of the age, and that He would welcome us into Paradise at the moment of our death or return to take us to be with Him in glory. We should remember that at every moment of our lives, in every joy and every sorrow, in every moment of peace and every moment of strife, He is abiding not only with us, but in us.
Sixth, we should remember why He did all this. He told the disciples that He had desired “with great desire” to have that meal with them in the Upper Room. That same desire must be there in His heart now each time we come to the Lord’s Table. Knowing our own sin, it will always lie beyond us to understand how He could have such a desire to commune with us, but such was and is and ever will be the nature of his amazing love.
And so we sing Montgomery’s hymn to the Lord Jesus Himself who welcomes us to come to His Table. We tell Him that we will remember Him at the final line of each stanza.
In stanza 1 we sing that coming to the Lord’s Table causes us to remember all that He has told us in His gracious written word. The stanza seems to carry us to Calvary as if we are actually watching the Lord as He is dying before us, and promising there that we will not forget Him.
According to Thy gracious word,
In meek humility,
This will I do, my dying Lord,
I will remember Thee.
In stanza 2 we come back to the table as we receive the bread and the cup of a new covenant, a new testament in His body and blood. And we embrace the personal nature of it all, that it was “for my sake” and that this becomes “my bread from heaven.” Thus we remember Him.
Thy body, broken for my sake,
My bread from heaven shall be;
Thy testamental cup I take,
And thus remember Thee.
In stanza 3 we are transported again back to that day in redemptive history when Jesus sweat great drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. What enormous conflict took place there during those three hours as Satan must have been tempting Him yet again to turn aside from the cross.
Gethsemane can I forget?
Or there Thy conflict see,
Thine agony and bloody sweat,
And not remember Thee?
In stanza 4 we look at the cross from our vantage point now in time, turning our eyes to see at Calvary the Lamb of God offering Himself as a sacrifice in our place. It’s so important to continue to stress today that Jesus did not die as a moral example; He died as a substitutionary sacrifice.
When to the cross I turn mine eyes
And rest on Calvary,
O Lamb of God, my sacrifice,
I must remember Thee.
In stanza 5 we sing to the Lord Jesus that we will do as He asked back then: we will remember Him in “all Thy pains” and “all Thy love” as long as we have breath, as long as “a pulse remains.” How could we do any less, when He has done so much for us?
Remember Thee and all Thy pains
And all Thy love to me;
Yea, while a breath, a pulse remains,
I will remember Thee.
In stanza 6 we see a dramatic change in the final line. Here we are looking ahead to the end of our earthly lives “when these failing lips grow dumb and mind and memory flee.” We see that happen with the elderly, and perhaps one day with ourselves. Then, as Jesus comes for us, we ask the one whom we have remembered throughout our lives to then “remember me.”
And when these failing lips grow dumb
And mind and memory flee,
When Thou shalt in Thy kingdom come,
Jesus, remember me.
We sing Montgomery’s hymn to the tune DALEHURST. It was written in 1874 by the solicitor and amateur musician Arthur Cottman (1841-1879). He married Mary Maria Crafer on August 5, 1861, in Monken Hadley, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom. He lived in Worcestershire, England, United Kingdom in 1851. He died in 1879, in Brentford, London, England, United Kingdom, at the young age of only 38.
Here is a link to the singing of four of the stanzas.