http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16513373/heart-of-my-own-heart
If you were to ask me to name my favorite hymn, I’d probably hem and haw, then list a bunch of favorites, and end up saying, “It depends.” I mean, how do you choose a single favorite hymn? But if you were to ask me what hymn I sing most often when I’m alone with God, that would be easy: “Be Thou My Vision.” If that makes it my favorite, so be it.
For me, it’s become a love song, kind of like the familiar phrases I default to when telling my wife how much I love her, which over time have become infused with great depths of emotional meaning. The verses of this hymn give voice to my intimate delight in and longing for the Lover of my soul. When I sing it in private, just me and my piano, it’s rare when I can sing it without tears.
Typically, when a song touches me deeply, I’m curious to know more about who wrote it and why. I guess it’s easier to take hymns somewhat for granted. I’ve loved “Be Thou My Vision” for decades, but I never thought to look up its backstory until recently.
I discovered that this hymn’s origin is veiled in the misty past of ancient Ireland. We do know that the hymn’s progenitor is a poem that’s more than a millennium old, composed in Old Gaelic and consisting of sixteen couplets. Irish tradition claims its author was a beloved sixth-century Celtic poet named St. Dallán Forgaill, but scholars have linguistic reasons to doubt this claim. All we know is that the writer certainly was a poet and sure seems to have been a saint.
Thank God for Scholars and Editors
My search wasn’t in vain, because it revealed people God used to turn that ancient poem into the precious song we have today. Thank God for Mary Byrne (1880–1931), who dragged the poem out of academic obscurity by translating the ancient Gaelic into English. And thank God for Eleanor Hull (1860–1935), who chose twelve of the sixteen couplets from Byrne’s literal translation, and then skillfully crafted them into rhymes.
And thank God for the editors of the Irish Church Hymnal, who selected ten of Hull’s couplets, combined them into five four-line verses, and then, with a stroke of inspired genius, paired those deeply moving verses with an achingly beautiful Irish folk tune they named “Slane” (in honor of St. Patrick’s famous Easter festival fire on Slane Hill, which he burned in defiance of a pagan Irish king).
The hymn was first published in the 1919 edition of that Irish hymnal, and the rest, as they say, is history. “Be Thou My Vision” soon appeared in hymnals around the world, many of which trimmed it down to the four verses most of us know and love today.
Why do so many, like me, love this hymn so much? Because it gives poetic voice to our deep love and longing for the triune God, who is the Light of our lives (John 8:12), our ever-present, indwelling Word of life (1 John 1:1), the great Treasure of our hearts (Luke 12:34), and soon the Heaven of heaven for us forever (Psalm 73:25–26).
Thy Presence My Light
If the ancient author ever titled the poem, that too has been lost to the mists of time. For centuries it was known simply as “A Prayer.” But it’s hard to imagine a better title than the poem’s first four words, “Be thou my vision,” which in Old Gaelic read, “Rop tú mo bhoile.”
Verse 1, in my view, begins just where it should: a prayer for God to enlighten the eyes of our hearts that we may be filled with his hope (Ephesians 1:18). Listen to how beautifully the lyrics convey the biblical metaphor of light as understanding:
Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art;
Thou my best thought, by day or by night;
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
Implicitly woven into this verse are the New Testament references of Jesus as “the light of the world” and “the light of life” (John 8:12). But the words also carry an echo of one of my favorite verses from the Psalms:
With you is the fountain of life;
in your light do we see light. (Psalm 36:9)
Everyone who has known deep darkness of any kind — the darkness of sin or grief or pain or depression or loneliness or spiritual oppression — and has seen, however dimly, the Light of life shining in their darkness, understands how meaningful this verse can be. It resonates with the hope that this light will not ultimately be overcome by our darkness.
Be thou my vision, O Lord, for you are the light of my life.
Thou My True Word
The prayer of verse 2 builds on the prayer of verse 1, asking that God would fill us with the riches of his wisdom and knowledge (Romans 11:33):
Be Thou my wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father; I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.
Notice how simply this verse expresses the profound and mysterious New Testament teaching that requires pages to unpack in prose: that Christian wisdom comes from the Father and Son (our true Word) dwelling inside us through the Holy Spirit (John 14:23, 26), a gift we receive through our adoption as sons (Ephesians 1:5). The wisdom we’re praying for here is clearly not “a wisdom of this age,” but a wisdom that can only be “spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:6, 14).
Be thou my wisdom, O Lord, for you are the ultimate Truth.
My Treasure Thou Art
Now we come to my favorite verse of this great hymn, the one most likely to prompt tears:
Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise;
Thou mine inheritance, now and always;
Thou and Thou only first in my heart;
High King of heaven, my treasure Thou art.
Verse 3 is my favorite — not because the other verses are less true or less hope-giving or less precious, but because Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:34). Our treasure is whatever we love and long for most — what most satisfies, enthralls, and therefore captivates our hearts. And in this fallen age, where even our best love for our great Treasure is defective and lacking, our love is almost always accompanied by a desire to love him more perfectly, more completely. Hence, my tears, a sweet, melancholic mixture of love and longing.
So, I love this verse, the heart of the hymn, the Love Song within the love song. Because God, as the next verse will say, is the Heart of our hearts — the Treasure that makes his light beautiful, his wisdom desirable, and his heaven so heavenly.
Be thou my Treasure, O Lord, first in my heart now and always.
O Bright Heaven’s Sun
Verse 4 ends the hymn just where it should: with the great “blessed hope” of the Christian life (Titus 2:13), when “we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).
High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun;
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O Ruler of all.
If our heart is always with our treasure, and if God is our Treasure, then the Heaven of heaven will be the Heart of our heart. And the Sun of heaven will enable us to see more light than we’ve ever seen, “for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23). And so it will be, always and forever. To which we say, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20).
What a priceless gift, this hymn. Thank you, Lord, for that ancient Celtic poet whose God-entranced heart overflowed so eloquently through his quill. And thank you for those throughout history whose collective labors have made this great song of love and longing available to us. And thank you for the gifted Celtic folk musicians whose sweet, haunting melody makes it so wonderful to sing.
But most of all, thank you, Lord, for being the Light of our lives, our ever-present, indwelling Word of life, the great Treasure of our hearts, and someday the Heaven of heaven.
Yes, O Lord, be thou our vision, now in this darkened age, and soon — may it be soon! — in unveiled, eternal glory with unclouded eyes.
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The Hardest Act in Parenting Teens
Audio Transcript
Today we look at parenting, particularly parenting through the teen years. Parenting teens is full of pressures and challenges. One source of those pressures are the demands and the questions put on mom and dad for which there are no easy answers. We’re trying to help our teens think for themselves with discernment in a very complex world. And it is one of the pressures Pastor John has identified as a trigger in men of what we call a midlife crisis, a crisis that often hits a dad in his early forties, when he has teens at home. We saw that connection in APJ 1173.
Dads, as leaders, bear a particular calling to their homes of self-sacrificing leadership, all to avoid giving the devil a foothold in our homes. Ephesians 4:26–27 raises the stakes that high when it commands us, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” High stakes.
In a 2007 sermon on this text, Pastor John spoke directly to dads of teens. He began with a word on modesty but then transitioned to talk about a dad’s hardest role in parenting teenagers. Here’s Pastor John.
There are spiritual dangers, brothers, coming at our families from every side today, innumerable and subtle. We need valiant warriors as never before, not with spears and shield, but with biblical discernment and courage. Husbands, pray for your wife and children every day without fail — over and over again during the day. “Protect them. Protect them. Lead them in paths of righteousness. Don’t let them go into temptation. Guard their lives. Make their marriages work. Make their children strong. Protect them, O my God.” That’s your job: to call down from God, hour by hour, blessing on this family. That’s what headship means. Pray for them.
Dads with Standards
Then set standards for your wife and children. Work them through with your wife. Here again, primary responsibility means talking to her about it. She’s probably got some better ideas than you, but taking initiative to talk is what she so longs for. Women are not eager to be dominated. They’re eager for their husbands to take initiative to make things happen in the moral sphere of their marriage. “Would you please help me set some standards for these kids and then help me carry this through?” She shouldn’t have to say that. She wants you to step up. Let’s do this together. Take some initiative.
“Husbands, pray for your wife and children every day without fail — over and over again during the day.”
We’ve got to figure out what this kid’s going to watch on TV. We’ve got to figure out what movies they’re going to go to. We’ve got to figure out what music is coming into this house. And we’ve got to figure out how low that neckline is going. And that’s mainly your job, dad. Now on that last one, I’m fully aware that it is mainly mom and daughter that worked that out from age two months to 22. However, dad, they desperately need your input on this. They need you to celebrate when they get it right and look beautiful and modest. And they need you to say, “You’re not going out of the house with that on.”
Anger: The Great Enemy
Here’s another one. The Bible is very clear about one of the most dangerous intruders, spiritually, in the family. Let me read it to you from Ephesians 4:26–27: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” How is the devil allowed into a teenager’s bedroom? How is the devil allowed at night into a married couple’s bedroom? Answer: when they go to bed angry. If you go to bed angry night after night after night, if that kid is seething at you in there, and no steps at reconciliation have happened, the door is just thrown open wide to the devil. And the havoc he can wreak over weeks, months, and years to destroy a soul, a marriage, and a family is awesome.
So, what are you going to do? I’ll tell you, dads. This is where headship is so hard that no woman would ever want it. This is the hardest thing in the world. Headship means you must initiate reconciliation no matter how many times it’s been her fault or the kid’s fault. You have not the luxury as head to say, “She did it, and if she doesn’t say she’s sorry, I’m hitting the pillow.” No way. Justice might say that’s the right way to act, but let me ask you this: Is that the way Jesus treated his bride? How many times has he come back to her and back to her? How many times has he come back to you and back to you and back to you and back to you, saying, “Here I am, ready to make up”? A thousand times. Seventy times seven times seven times seven he has come back to you when it’s your fault and not his. And he took the initiative to make it right. He died to make it right. Will we husbands say, “It’s her turn”? Yes, we will, without the Holy Spirit. This is impossible without Christ.
“Headship means you must initiate reconciliation no matter how many times it’s been her fault or the kid’s fault.”
You don’t want to be heads, women, because I’m holding the men accountable that this family not go to bed angry at night. You knock on that teenager’s door. Oh, this can be sweet, brothers. This is as hard as it gets. You knock on that door, and any little increment of fault that you bear over against his many faults, you confess it. Not many things will break a teenager, but that might, to walk in and say, “Son, my reaction to what you did was over the top. What you did was wrong; that’s not the issue here. But my reaction to it was over the top. I want to apologize and say it wasn’t in love. I just got out of control, and I’m sorry, and I’d like you to forgive me.”
You talk about sweet sleep. You talk about healing balms in the mind and the soul, dads.
Keep the Devil Out
Now, I’m not naive. Good night. I’ve been married 38 years. There are attempts at peace that don’t work, all right? But you have got to try. You get down on your knees. Noël and I have knelt beside each other, and we haven’t hardly been able to pray. We just kneel there in silence. Who’s going to pray first? Neither of us feels like praying. We’re so upset, and this hinders your prayers big time. And you can just eke out, “God, help us. I want it to be better.”
It’s your job, dad. Hardest thing in the world. Keep the devil out of the bedroom and out of the kids’ rooms by not letting the sun go down on your anger — inasmuch as it lies within you.
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For God So Warned the World: How He Keeps the Ones He Loves
If an old-time preacher, one who believed in uncomfortable realities like the wrath of God, human depravity, and divine judgment, rode his horse through some of the streets of American Christianity, what might he experience?
Sounding the alarm as Paul Revere, this watchman might gallop down our paved roads yelling,
“Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming! Make way for the King! Repent and believe! Stay awake! Keep the faith! Only those who endure to the end will be saved! Put the flesh to death by the Spirit! Obey him! Finish the race! Look to Jesus! Trust him for his grace! He is coming to judge the world in righteousness!”
To his delight, a good number would trim (or would have already trimmed) their lamps. These already live looking out the window — trusting, praying, fellowshipping, killing sin, living awake — ready for their Master to return.
But to his amazement, some voices would shoot back from dimmed rooms:
“You must be lost, dear sir. We are Christians. You must have meant to stir up the next town of Never-Heard or perhaps Secular City down the way.”
“Good works,” laughs another. “Why, good sir, do not tell me you are Roman. ‘By works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight’ (Romans 3:20). Our faith justifies, we will not quiver as though our doings made us right with God.”
“Forgive me,” the preacher says, taken aback. “I did not mean to have you rise and live and work to earn salvation — it cannot be done and cursed are all who try. I meant rise with your new nature, new affections, new allegiances, new Spirit, and new commandments, live and stay alert with holy urgency. Walk the narrow way, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Strive for the holiness without which we cannot see the Lord. Confirm your calling and election.”
“Yes. Yes. We have heard of your kind before,” remarks the first. “More emphasis on our works than Christ’s. Listen here, Christ lived a perfect life for me and died in my place. I have failed, will fail — and often fail — but Christ, sir, Christ lived such a life in my place. I refuse to return to law. I am gospel-centered, you see.”
“Oh, sir,” adds the second, “now I know you to be trouble. What is this talk of wrath and judgment? We are Christians. All these warnings, threats, exhortations, admonishments come to my ears as the fearmongerings of a legal religion. No condemnation is mine in Christ. I wish you a speedy return to Heretics Highway.”
With that, before another word could be spoken, several windows might shut, otherwise their snores would soon become audible from the street.
Are the Warnings for Me?
The above account, albeit exaggerated, captures the instinct of some professing Christians today when they come across the imperatives and the warnings of Scripture.
Some self-professed “gospel-centered” Christian teaching leaves little room for discussing our efforts and actions besides repeating that they do not justify; sees Christian living as an almost irrelevant holding cell before heaven; understands justification as the totality of salvation; has little-to-no category for conditional divine promises; and holds dismissive ideas about the warnings and commandments of Scripture.
“Once saved always saved,” they say in defense. “Jesus obeyed so I do not have to.” When they stumble across an imperative or warning, they dismiss it as yet another gospel-reminder — “Of course I could never cut off my hand of lust, or live a self-disciplined, pure, humble, hospitable, forgiving, or faithful life — but thank God Jesus did all that for me.” However, true cross-centeredness takes up all the aims of the cross: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24).
“The red ink falling from the cross did not redact the imperatives or cautions of the New Testament for believers.”
Now, thank God that Jesus has lived the life we could not live, and died the death we should have died, and rose again from the grave in victory — the heart of our faith. But the red ink falling from the cross did not redact the imperatives or cautions of the New Testament for believers. The cross does not silence its Lord.
God, from the beginning, has graciously warned his people of the hidden and inevitable consequences of their rebellion. Beginning in the garden, he spoke to the sinless man, “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). When he commands and warns us in the New Testament, do we listen?
Passing over Verses
Let’s take, for example, the cohabitating realities of justification by faith alone and a living warning of hell bound up together in Romans 8.
First, the treasured language of justification of Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” For the true believer, joined to Christ by faith: zero condemnation right now because of what Jesus has accomplished. We stand “not guilty” in the courtroom — and more than that, declared righteous through faith (Romans 3:28). Because of a work done outside of us yet applied to us, all our sins are forgiven, our guilt taken, no condemnation.
Some, then, take this promise, this glory, and infer that they are safe, already in heaven, with essentially nothing required of them until Jesus returns. Nothing but sunny skies ahead. But such forecast changes just a few verses later: “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13).
Huh?
“If we live according to the flesh, we will die, no matter what we profess about justification.”
After telling them (and us) no condemnation exists in Christ, the apostle Paul tells them — the same group he addressed in Romans 8:1 — that if we live according to the flesh, we will die, no matter what we profess about justification. Does our gospel-centeredness mute this warning? Do we skip over these verses? We shouldn’t.
To Professing Christians
Again, Paul warns, “Professing Christian, if you do not put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, you will surely die” — meaning, the eternal death of conscious punishment in hell. The true belief that no condemnation remains for them right now in Christ did not negate the true warning right now against living in sin.
Now note, for those wondering about assurance, Paul also will soon remind us that all the truly justified (the same ones who persevere in killing their sin by the Spirit) — will be glorified. “Those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). And by the end of the chapter, he exclaims that nothing in all the universe can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:37–39).
So which is it? Do I believe I am free from condemnation, or do I fear the possibility of condemnation? Both.
Contemplating Life Apart from Christ
We believe in the assurance Christ offers, and we fear turning from him, being lured away by the flesh, the devil, and the world. God issues real warnings about hell to keep us from that very hell. They serve as real (not hypothetical) means God uses for our perseverance.
God promises and God warns — carrot and stick — to bring us home to himself safely. His “precious and very great promises” sing us to unseen realms where his glory dwells, while his thunder shakes us from earthly temptations toward suicidal pleasures. All of his sheep will make it home treasuring both his promises (Romans 8:1) and his warnings (Romans 8:13).
And God promised this long ago:
They shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. (Jeremiah 32:38–40)
The fear of God is a new-covenant adhesive to keep us near God. Israel did not have this fear; a fear that fastens when temptation comes. Such dread is unlike fearing an abusive father, a violent fear sending us cowering away. The Christian’s fear draws him ever to Christ in full assurance of faith (Hebrews 10:22). Christ will find us at peace at his return (2 Peter 3:14). In Christ, we know that God won’t renege his covenant, nor do we look over our shoulder waiting for unexpected blows.
The fear soberly considers life outside of Christ, weighs the real consequences of jumping from the ark into God’s waves of judgment — and trembles.
Delight to Fear
Such faith believes that if we deny Christ, Christ will deny us (2 Timothy 2:12); if we forsake God’s kindness, we will be cut off (Romans 11:20–22); if we sow to corruption, we will reap corruption (Galatians 6:7–8); if we pamper our right eye of lust, we will be thrown into hell (Matthew 5:29); if we do not hold our original confidence to the end, we will be lost (Hebrews 3:12–14); if we continue sinning deliberately, no sacrifice for our sins remains (Hebrews 10:26–27); if we live according to the flesh, we will die (Romans 8:13; Galatians 5:19–21).
This faith takes hold of the promises that woo us to Christ, and gladly receives the warnings that shout to our souls, Do not leave him!
The new-covenant warnings are not washed away by the blood of Christ. The new-covenant people of God are those that fear him forever, with the fear of faith, for their good. Like Nehemiah, they “delight” to fear God’s name (Nehemiah 1:11) and believe, with gratitude, the cautions he gives about falling from him. They mind his warnings and rest in his promises. They love his word, serve his people, and cherish his likeness. They sing, “No condemnation in Christ,” and cry, “Flee from the wrath to come.”
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Hamilton: An American Prodigal
In July of 1741, a 37-year-old Jonathan Edwards grabbed a sermon already preached in Northampton and took it on the road to Enfield. There it was “attended with remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.”1 Edwards spoke of sinners in the hands of an angry God and grace to those in Christ in a message that would come to represent the First Great Awakening. “What are we,” Edwards asked, “that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?”
Thirty years later, the spirit of Edwards was alive and well — yet in a most unlikely place and through a most unlikely pen. In August of 1772, a hurricane, described as “one of the most dreadful . . . that memory or any records whatever can trace,”2 swept through the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The fury came at dusk and “raged very violently till ten o’clock.” Then followed the eye, “a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.” Finally came four more hours of “redoubled fury . . . till near three o’clock in the morning.”
A few days later, after hearing a Sunday sermon, “a Youth of [the] Island,”3 seventeen years old, composed a letter to his derelict father, who was living on another island. The youth wrote, “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. . . . In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.” But this rare teen, in Edwards-like fashion, saw more than natural causation: “That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity.”4
Reforming Influences
It was no accident that this youth, named Alexander Hamilton, would take up such a perspective on the hurricane. Earlier that year, a Princeton graduate and pastor named Hugh Knox (1733–1790) had arrived on the island, discovered the precocious orphan, and begun to serve as a spiritual father to him.
In the 1750s, Knox had been student and good friend of Aaron Burr Sr. (1716–1757), founder and second president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey. Burr had married Esther Edwards, Jonathan’s third child (of eleven), and Burr himself greatly admired Edwards. Knox admired Burr. Now the young Hamilton sat at the feet of Knox, on September 6, 1772, as he preached on the hurricane. Later that day, the young Hamilton, imbibing the Calvinist theology, sat to compose the now-famous letter to his father.
Hamilton’s Christian interests cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work.
Doubtless, the first time Hamilton would have heard the name “Aaron Burr” was from Knox, speaking about the father, rather than his son. Burr Sr. died in 1757, just a year after the birth of his son. (Edwards then became the third president at Princeton and would have raised his grandson, Aaron Jr., had Edwards not died of a botched smallpox inoculation in 1758.)
In the fall of 1772, Knox was so impressed with Hamilton’s hurricane letter that he steered it to the local paper (published October 3, 1772), and it became the occasion for raising funds to send this gifted “Youth of this Island” to the mainland, in hopes he would study, as Knox had, at the college in Princeton.
‘Adore Thy God’
What did the seventeen-year-old Hamilton write? The hurricane had thundered, he claimed, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his Christian faith, found refuge:
See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . What have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored. He will snatch me from ruin. He will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fullness of never ending joys.
The young Hamilton then exhorts his readers, “Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy,” and he ends with this plea: “Oh Lord help. Jesus be merciful!”5
That same year, Hamilton wrote a Christian hymn, one that his future wife, Eliza, would come to prize and cling to during the half-century she outlived him. In the hymn, Hamilton confessed,
O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word.6
Yet this early Hamilton is not the one we typically remember today, nor the one celebrated in the award-winning musical (which Lin-Manuel Miranda spent seven years writing, from 2008 until its debut on Broadway in 2015).
What Hamilton is perhaps most famous for is the circumstances of his death, in a so-called “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, Hamilton took a duel with Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., who was the sitting vice president of the United States. Strangely enough, citing Christian conviction, Hamilton “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.
Hamilton’s Four Stages
Remarkably, in 2004, Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page biography began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — and just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.
Of our interest, Hamilton seems to have experienced a Christian conversion, under Reformed (and Edwardsean) teaching, when the Great Awakening came to the West Indies in the early 1770s. Yet from a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s story is complicated, to say the least.
In his late teens, he professed faith, wrote hymns and commentaries on the Bible, and daily knelt to pray. But in his youthful zeal to rise above his station and in his ascent to political prominence, he became a prodigal. None rose so fast and then fell so far as Hamilton. But when he was finally humbled, neither Chernow nor Miranda could ignore his “late-flowering religious interests.”7
In this complex life of Hamilton, Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey, writing in 1955, identified “four distinct stages” in his spiritual development:
his early piety, from 1772–1777
a “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” from 1777–1792
his “opportunistic religiosity,” from 1792 to 1800
his final season, from 1800 until his death in 1804, when he “began sincerely seeking God in this time of failure and suffering”8Jesus told a parable in Luke 15 of a youth who left home for a far country, squandered his life in reckless living, and eventually realized the world could not satisfy. In time, the young man “came to himself” and returned home to his father (Luke 15:17).
Whether there was a celebration in heaven on July 12, 1804, for the final homecoming of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot tell you with certainty. But I want you to hear the rest of the story, so far as we can tell, as we weave together both Jesus’s parable of the prodigal with these four distinct stages in Hamilton’s spiritual development.
A challenge here is that Hamilton’s life will look very different to a political scientist and a Christian pastor. I’m a pastor. Without doing injustice to his life as a statesman, I want to draw out, with special emphasis, the often-muted story of Hamilton’s prodigal journey and late-flowering faith.9
1. His Early Piety (1772–1777)
The younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. (Luke 15:13)
Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis. Due to his mother’s previous marriage and alleged infidelity, his parents were not legally married. He had an older brother, and his father abandoned them when he was ten. Two years later, his mother died of yellow fever. Orphaned, Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin, who soon thereafter committed suicide. At age fourteen, he went to work as a clerk for an importer-exporter on the island of St. Croix and excelled. In 1772, Knox arrived on St. Croix and took an interest in him.
After the publication of the hurricane letter, Hamilton came to New Jersey, hoping to enroll in Princeton. He proposed an abbreviated course of study to president John Witherspoon, who denied his request. (Recently a student named James Madison had completed a two-year fast-track at Princeton and worked himself into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps Witherspoon had Madison in mind when he declined Hamilton’s request.)
Undeterred, Hamilton took his proposal to King’s College in New York, where it was approved, and he began classes in the fall of 1773. As early as that summer, he made his first public speech in favor of the revolutionary cause. His college roommate, Robert Troup, remembered Hamilton’s “habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning” and that “he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”10
However, Hamilton’s physical and social journey into the far country soon led to a spiritual pilgrimage — or better, to spiritual lethargy and distraction, as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting in New York and began to draw forcefully on his energies. However devout he may have been at arrival, his unusually able brain and pen were soon captured by the feverish energy of the day. Rather than to Christian jeremiads and hymns, his attention turned to the revolution.
Ashbel Green (1762–1848), who would later serve as the eighth president of Princeton, reflected on those prewar days in the British colonies: “The military spirit that pervaded the whole land was exceedingly unfriendly to vital piety, among all descriptions of the citizens.” And this was especially so at the colleges:
Military enthusiasm had seized the minds of the students, to such a degree that they could think of little else than warlike operations. By the time the cloud of war had passed over, the colleges were more enamored of Deism and the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being than of orthodox piety.11
Hamilton too, alongside his fellow collegiates, was swept up into what was trending, into the talk of the cultural moment. And he had manifest abilities — skilled with words, brave enough for battle, and a natural leader. His revolutionary success quickly pulled him into the heart of American cause and its politics from 1775 to 1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century.
His Christian interests, however, cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work as Washington’s aide-de-camp, then in establishing a law practice in New York, and climactically as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795. Alongside Madison, this young Hamilton would prove to be one of the great intellects of the founding generation. And while being every bit Madison’s match in political thought (if not exceeding him), he far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.
2. Fifteen Years of Indifference (1777–1792)
There [in the far country] he squandered his property in reckless living. (Luke 15:13)
Adair and Harvey call this the “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” when politically he “shot up like a skyrocket.”12 Hamilton’s wordsmithing and courage had propelled him to revolutionary leadership. In 1777, he was promoted to Washington’s side.
Now 22 years old, he would be Washington’s right-hand man during the revolution and, later, under the new constitution, the first secretary of the treasury from 1789 until 1795. Then he would essentially function as the prime minister and occupy the most powerful seat in the first executive administration. Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force, at least in public life. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington.
But it was not only Washington (whose guidance was political) who influenced him, but also Eliza, whose sway was gently but relentlessly spiritual. He married her in 1780. She was, even then, what we would call an “evangelical Christian” today, and she became only more so as she aged.
“As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her [eight] children,”13 and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came later. She endured his wandering and, in the end, may have won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).
Hamilton was there at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, leading a battalion and with distinction. After the war, his ascending career seemed nonstop. In 1782, he was appointed to Congress from New York, under the Articles of Confederation. Here he would see firsthand how weak and inadequate they were for a league of thirteen states.
In 1783, he resigned from Congress to establish a law practice in New York. In 1786, he wrote the letter calling delegates to a convention in Philadelphia for the summer of 1787. He attended this Constitutional Convention, and the following year he organized and edited The Federalist Papers, partnering with Madison and John Jay to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.
Under Hamilton’s lead in 1789–1795, the Treasury Department drove the executive branch and new government. He grew the department to more than five hundred employees, while the War Department had a dozen employees, and Jefferson’s State Department only six.
And yet it was in this rapid rise, in his shooting up like a rocket, that cracks began to show — in particular, in 1791, in the adultery that Chernow calls “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.”14 It would be whispered in private rooms until 1797 and then proclaimed from rooftops. We’ll come back to this in the next section.15
3. His ‘Opportunistic Religiosity’ (1792–1800)
When he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14–16)
Washington began his second term in 1793. In January, France’s Louis XVI was executed. By June, the Committee of Public Safety came to power in Paris with its Reign of Terror. France became the unceasing controversy of Washington’s second term, driving party divisions deeper between Hamilton and Jefferson, who soon resigned.
With the furor over the French Revolution came fresh atheistic fears among many faithful Christians. Hamilton saw the pro-French Jeffersonians exposed and “attempted to enlist God in the Federalist party to buttress that party’s temporal power,” write Adair and Harvey.16
Unfortunately Hamilton’s blasphemous attempts to use God for his all-too-human ends were extremely successful with large numbers of the clergy. . . . Actually it is during these years when religious slogans were so often on his lips that Hamilton seems farther from God and from any understanding of his Son, Jesus Christ, than at any time in his whole career.17
Like Jefferson, Hamilton was eventually worn down by political libel and public slander. In debt, with a growing family at home, he decided to return to New York in 1795. In this season, his early forties, he would experience the beginning of his many humblings.
The Adams administration, beginning in 1797, would bring mounting frustrations — both for him and him for Adams. He began to make several terrible judgment calls. In October of 1799, Adams broke with his cabinet (and Hamilton) to send an envoy to France, and in the wake of that came what Chernow calls “a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment.”18
The dominoes began to fall, and Hamilton with them. In December of 1799, Washington died, his surrogate father. By February 1800, it became clear that the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Aaron Burr and his opposing coalition won control of New York. In a matter of months, Hamilton’s political power and influence crumbled.
To top it all off, in the election of 1800, his old cabinet rival Jefferson won the presidency — and with Burr as vice president. As Adair and Harvey write, “Perhaps never in all American political history has there been a fall from power so rapid, so complete, so final as Hamilton’s in the period from October 1799 to November 1800.”19
And all this just eighteen months after the papers got ahold of his six-year secret, the adultery of 1791. Hamilton, hoping to protect his financial reputation, published a painfully long and detailed pamphlet confessing to his marital infidelity. He plainly did not know when to stop. His finances may have been in order. His soul was not.
Back to the Squalor
From a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s adultery appears as his most glaring flaw, even more obviously and unqualifiedly than the duel. His adultery showed how far his heart had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. We can indeed be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.
There once was a great king in Israel who, as a prelude to infidelity, remained in the city when others went to war (2 Samuel 11:1). So too Hamilton, at the height of his power in 1791 — and with so much work to do — stayed in Philadelphia while his family summered upstate.
That summer, a 23-year-old woman approached him, telling of an abusive husband and asking for help. Later, in the notorious Reynolds Pamphlet, his extended public confession in 1797, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance. “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”20 This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer (and measured admirer), appears stunned by Hamilton’s folly:
Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.21
Yet even with the Reynolds affair made public, devastating as it was, it was still another eighteen months before Hamilton began to utterly crumble.
4. His Final Season of Suffering and Seeking (1800–1804)
When he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” And he arose and came to his father. (Luke 15:17–20)
One great irony of Hamilton’s story, and caution for us today, is that when he was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ. And yet as he was humbled, turning again to Jesus, he could have been at his worst politically.
More terrible judgments followed the Reynolds Pamphlet.22 Even as late as the spring of 1802, he wrote a letter to fellow Federalist James Bayard proposing what he called a “Christian Constitutional Society.” I suspect this to be a genuine, though terribly naive, expression of his renewed Christian faith. It may also be one last gasp of his 1790s opportunism.
When Hamilton was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ.
To counter Jefferson’s French-friendly Democratic Societies, Hamilton proposed a new society that would exist to promote (1) the Christian religion and (2) the Constitution of the United States. He saw both under Jeffersonian threat, but his Federalist interests were clearly political, or at least politically expedient.
“By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson,” says Chernow, “Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. . . . Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends.” However misguided the effort, Chernow can’t help but recognize, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”23
Quiet Uptown
In November of 1801, the most devastating domino fell: his eldest child, Philip, age nineteen, died in a duel, defending his father’s honor. Learning of the duel, Hamilton had advised his son to take the righteous course and throw away his shot, that is, shoot into the air. But his son’s opponent did not. This would prove to be Alexander’s greatest devastation. Soon he would write to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”24
Yet by late 1801, Hamilton was plainly taking deep solace in Christianity and Philip’s profession of faith: “It was the will of heaven and [Philip] is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”25
“While the sufferings and frustrations resulting from political failure started Hamilton’s religious conversion,” claim Adair and Harvey, it was this “terrible personal tragedy [that] crystalized the change.”26 “This plenitude of sorrow . . . accounts for a totally new note — the first echo in all his writings of ‘Thy will be done’ — that now appears in certain Hamilton letters. . . . The old Hamilton arrogance had disappeared.”27
Hamilton’s spiritual renewal in this last season is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a first-rate biography or on Broadway. His reawakening appears to have just preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death. Miranda partially captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown,” where Hamilton sings,
I take the children to church on Sunday,A sign of the cross at the door,And I pray.That never used to happen before.
What may be a “grace too powerful to name” on Broadway is precisely the name we in the church know as powerful. And we name the name: Jesus.
In July of 1804, on the night before his own deadly duel, he would write,
This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of [Christianity], my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.28
And so we ask, Why the duel with Burr? Just three years prior, he had lost his firstborn to a duel. On multiple occasions, he publicly had expressed his own disavowal of dueling. How could he agree to this, and especially now as a professing Christian?
Instead of engaging in speculation, I’ll let Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s successor as secretary of the treasury, express his sense of its senselessness. On the day of the duel, Wolcott wrote to his wife that
Gen’l Hamilton . . . reasoned himself into a belief, that though the custom [of dueling] was in the highest degree criminal, yet there were peculiar reasons which rendered it proper for him, to expose himself to Col. Burr in particular. This instance of the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point, has often been noticed as one of the most common yet unaccountable frailties of human nature.29
This was, thought Wolcott, “the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point.” Wolcott added at the end his letter, “Gen’l Hamilton has of late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion.”
However tragic and ill-conceived his decision to row across the river to the dueling grounds in New Jersey, that would be not the place of his death. Hamilton threw away his shot while Burr’s bullet struck him in the liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton seemed dead onsite but revived on the open water while being rowed back to New York. He lived another 31 hours, until 2:00pm the following day.
Mercy Through the Redeemer
Hamilton’s professions of faith on his deathbed are by no means his only indications of Christian faith, but they are his clearest and most documented.
First, he called for Benjamin Moore, episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia (formerly King’s) College. He asked to receive the Lord’s Supper. Hamilton was not a church member, so Moore hesitated to administer the sacrament (he would return later and administer it). Moore asked him, “Do you sincerely repent of your sins past? Have you a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ? And are you disposed to live in love and charity with all men?”30
According to Moore, Hamilton “lifted up his hands and said, ‘With the utmost sincerity of heart I can answer those questions in the affirmative — I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.’” Moore says that he “had no reason to doubt [Hamilton’s] sincerity.”31
Rich Grace, Only Refuge
A second minister also visited Hamilton on his deathbed — his old friend Rev. John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church.32 Mason told Hamilton that he
had nothing to address him in his affliction, but that same gospel of the grace of God, which it is my office to preach to the most obscure and illiterate: that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all men have sinned and come short of his glory [Romans 3:23]; and that they must apply to him for pardon and life, as sinners, whose only refuge is in his grace by righteousness through our Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 5:21].
Hamilton responded, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Mason then turned his attention to
the infinite merit of the Redeemer, as the propitiation for sin, the sole ground of our acceptance with God; the sole channel of his favor to us; and cited the following passages of Scripture: There is no name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus [Acts 4:12]. He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them [Hebrews 7:25]. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin [1 John 1:7].
Mason reminded him that “the precious blood of Christ was as effectual and as necessary to wash away the transgression which had involved him in suffering, as any other transgression; and that he must there, and there alone, seek peace for his conscience. . . . He assented, with strong emotions, to these representations, and declared his abhorrence of the whole transaction.”33 Mason then
recurred to the topic of the divine compassions; the freedom of pardon in the Redeemer Jesus to perishing sinners. “That grace, my dear General, which brings salvation is rich, rich.”
“Yes,” interrupted [Hamilton], “it is rich grace.”
“And on that grace,” continued [Mason], “a sinner has the highest encouragement to repose his confidence, because it is tendered to him upon the surest foundation; the scripture testifying that ‘we have redemption through the blood of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace’ [Ephesians 1:7].”
At this point, Hamilton looked upward and said with emphasis, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Mason’s narrative continues with more Scripture and further affirmations from Hamilton.
Finally, writes Mason,
As I was retiring, [Hamilton] lifted up his hands in the attitude of prayer, and said feebly, “God be merciful to — ” His voice sunk, so that I heard not the rest distinctly, but understood him to quote the words of the publican in the Gospel, and to end with “me a sinner.”34
Puritan Roots and Prayers
Clearly Hamilton’s late-life return to his early faith and his deathbed confessions raise questions. As Christians, many of us may feel both relief and some uneasiness at the whole scene. That Hamilton never joined a church is troubling. Not many thieves on the cross have God as their Father but not the church as their mother. That is sobering.35 Perhaps he was an exception.
And those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of political success and pride want to redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally and to welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have strayed.
Lest Hamilton’s late-life Christian faith contribute to a distorted impression of the nation’s founding, we’re wise to concede that this, meager as it is, may be one of the clearer affirmations of evangelical faith among the inner circle of the founders. You will not find such in Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison. (One exception is John Jay.) This is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.
Hamilton’s political career is a warning to those today who pine to be in the room “where it happens.” Hamilton was there. It did not satisfy. For him, it led to the eroding and near ruin of what mattered most. His life is a cautionary tale.
Hamilton’s succession of humblings and his late-flowering Christian faith show us a man who rose to the top and was not satisfied with what this world alone has on offer. Military achievement and fame, political influence and position, success as a lawyer, an adoring wife, and eight children — his heart remained restless until, through much of his own sin and folly, he fell headlong.
But in his great humblings, he did seem to “come to himself” and find rest in the Savior in whom he first professed faith in his youth. For years, his life looked to Christian eyes like the third soil, “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). But perhaps, as Hamilton wrote in his hurricane letter, his Lord did “snatch me from ruin.” In his final season, and particularly in his clear final confessions, he professed “tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
May we too not only depart, but live now with such a reliance — and observing Hamilton’s follies, be spared some of our own.