My Song of Praise

Just a year or so before my husband, Charles, had his first heart attack, we were pulling off the expressway to go to our United Methodist parsonage in Austell where we lived at the time.

We saw a man fall down beside the road. We had gotten past him so we had to get to a place to turn around and drive back. Charles asked me to stay in the car until he talked to the man. The man was on crutches with a broken leg in a cast and was falling down drunk.

Charles put him in the car, took him home with us, put him in the shower and helped him get a bath while I washed his clothes and prepared him something to eat. Later Charles was able to get him into a Christian home for alcoholics.

So it is. We came to Jesus just as we are, clothed in the garments of sin, spiritually starving and sick unto death. We are welcomed by Christ (and hopefully by Christians), accepted just as we are, bathed in God's love and forgiveness…transformed and clothed in his Grace - indeed given a place at His table of Grace.

I heard Dottie Rambo tell of praying for a brother who had become alcoholic. He was finally won to the Lord and was the inspiration of one of my favorites of all of Dottie’s songs:

“He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Need
“Amazing Grace shall always be my song of praise
For it was Grace that bought my liberty.
I do not know just why He came to love me so…
He looked beyond my fault and saw my need…

I shall forever lift mine eyes to Calvary.
To view the cross where Jesus died for me…
How marvelous…the Grace that caught my falling soul:
He looked beyond my fault and saw my need.”