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.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (John 1:1–2)

Bible readers young and old have wondered why John begins his Gospel referring to Jesus as “the Word” that became flesh (John 1:1, 14). The Greek term for “word,” logos, is common enough in Greek. It appears over three hundred times in the New Testament, with different meanings in different contexts. But when understood in relation to Christ, the word has been furiously debated.

Yet Christ being the Logos is cause for more than debate; it is cause for worship. As Christians, we insist upon certain truths concerning Jesus as the Word to better appreciate the beauty of his person and work.

Divine Identity

John may have used logos in connection with the common Aramaic language he used himself. The Aramaic Targums (loose translations and expansions of the Old Testament scriptures) often refer to the “word [memra] of the Lord.” Hence, “Israel is saved by the Memra of the Lord with an everlasting salvation” (Isaiah 45:17).

Moreover, the standard Hebrew of Hosea 1:7, “I will save them by the Lord their God,” is paraphrased in the Aramaic Targum as, “I will redeem them by the word of the Lord their God.” So the “the Word” is a way of saying the Hebrew name of God (YHWH), such as in Numbers 7:89, where the Palestinian Targums say, “From there [between the cherubim] the Word spoke to him [Moses].” God spoke to Moses, but specifically the Logos spoke to Moses.

“Referring to Christ as ‘the Word’ is a virtual assertion of his divinity.”

Referring to Christ as “the Word,” then, is a virtual assertion of his divinity because of how the Aramaic Targums make use of this title. We rightly take the immediate context of John 1 as evidence for the preexistence of Christ, yet we must also see John’s designation of Christ as “the Word” as evidence for the deity of Christ, since Aramaic-speaking Jews would have understood the terminology as such in their first-century context.

Divine Self-Expression

In addition, logos often designates a word or the act of speaking (Acts 7:22). More specifically, logos can have in view God’s revelation, his divine self-expression (Mark 7:13).

The personification of God’s words to humanity are principally and majestically summed up in Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh (John 1:14). The Word is with God, the Word is God, and the Word became human, revealing (unlike any other) the glory of God (John 1:1–2, 18). All things were created through the uncreated Word (John 1:3) for the Word (Colossians 1:16).

Jesus, as the Word, is the Word of life (John 1:4); he gives light to the world and overcomes the darkness. But shockingly, the Word who has life in himself (John 5:26) experiences death on the cross. Through both his death and his resurrection from the dead, “He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God” (Revelation 19:13). Jesus as the Logos is not just the divine Son but the creating, saving divine Son, who reveals God and his purposes.

Logos and Creation

We are missing out on the glory of this title of Christ if we fail to go back to the beginning — an oversight John is careful to avoid, taking us back to the very beginning in his prologue. The distinction in Genesis 1 between God and his creation is clear. Moreover, the Logos is not only the Creator of all things, but the sustainer of all things as well (Hebrews 1:3). The Bible knows nothing of a God who creates and does not also at the same time powerfully sustain his creation by his providential control over all things.

God’s outward works follow a basic pattern: they are from the Father, through the Logos (Son), in the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 8:6). Genesis 1 also makes clear that God is a speaking God (“And God said . . .”). The psalmist tells us, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). When God creates, he also reveals, which is why the Son is properly called the Word of God. God does not speak to the creation unless through the Logos.

All truth comes from the Logos, for he is the sacred repository of all truth. The Logos provides the basis for God’s revelation to be communicated to humanity. Quite apart from his role as the Mediator in salvation, he is also the Mediator of all revelation, whether in creation or Scripture. The Logos creates, sustains, and speaks, communicating to all creatures some resemblance of God. He is God’s most powerful self-expression, which is precisely why John personifies the Word in order to highlight God’s ultimate self-disclosure. Apart from the Logos, we could know nothing of God.

Logos and Redemption

The Puritan Stephen Charnock speaks of the Logos as the one who makes continued declarations of God to humanity:

As the beautiful image of reason in the mind, breaking out with the discovery of itself in speech and words, is fittest to express the inward sense, thoughts, conceptions, nature, and posture of the mind, so the essential Word of God clothes himself with flesh, comes out from God to manifest to us the nature and thoughts of God. He which is the word of God is fittest to manifest the nature of God. (Works of Stephen Charnock, 4:132)

“God’s best declaration, his best words to humanity, come (fittingly) through the Logos.”

The Logos has the perfect ability to declare the revelation of God, for his “great end” is to reveal God (Matthew 11:25; John 1:18), whether to angels or men. Indeed, Charnock writes, even for the angels, when they looked upon Christ crucified, stricken by the Father, buried in the tomb, raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven to be enthroned forever as King of kings and Lord of lords, “they learned more of God and his nature, more of the depths of his wisdom, treasures of his grace, and power of his wrath, then they had done by all God’s actions in the world . . . in all those four thousand years wherein they had remained in being.”

In the Logos, all of God’s attributes are manifested and glorified. Natural theology offers sinful man a dim knowledge of God, but because of the Logos, the attributes of God “sparkle” since they have redemption in view. “Christ is the stage,” says Charnock, “wherein all the attributes of God act their parts.” God’s best declaration, his best words to humanity, come (fittingly) through the Logos.

In sum, by calling the Son the Logos, John is offering us a glimpse into not just the nature of Jesus (the divine revealer of God), but also the purpose of Jesus: he is the revealer of redemption, which ultimately comes not only through words but through actions. As the one who conquered death, he is the Logos of God, the only one in whom there is redemption. And this one in whom we have redemption — the Logos — is Yahweh himself.

Audio Transcript

Christ is our Sabbath rest. We celebrate this beautiful truth every Lord’s Day, every Sunday. But what about on a day like today, on Monday? Is Christ my Sabbath rest today, at work? That’s Pam’s question for you, Pastor John, a good one. “Pastor John, hello,” she writes. “Christ is our Sabbath rest. A hearty amen to that wonderful truth — to the degree that I understand it, and I don’t think I fully understand it quite yet! This seems to mean a lot more than Christ has set apart one day of rest for us, the Lord’s Day, Sunday. At the very end of APJ 658, you called Christ our ‘eternal rest,’ and that means, you said, ‘pervading all our work . . . we are restful in Christ.’ Can you explain this to me? How is Christ our Sabbath rest even while we are working?”

If we had time, we would dig into Hebrews 3 and 4, because there, that amazing author presents an argument for the present rest of the people of God and the future eternal rest for the people of God. He urges us in Hebrews 3:19 and 4:1 to “fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it [the rest]” — meaning, “fear unbelief,” because belief is the only way into the rest of Jesus Christ, both now and in the future.

“The burden and the yoke of the lordship of Jesus is easy and light.”

But we don’t have time to do that — as much as I’d love to — and I want to go straight to Pam’s main question: “How do we experience the Sabbath rest of Christ at work?” In other words, what meaning does it have, while we’re expending great energy, to speak of enjoying the restfulness of Christ in that very moment of wearying exertion?

Christ’s Easy Yoke

The text that I have in mind now is not Hebrews, but Matthew 11:28–30, where Jesus says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” The burden and the yoke of the lordship of Jesus is easy and light.

In the midst of our labor — our strenuous efforts to do our very best in our vocation — the submission at that moment to the demands of Jesus is called a restful experience. “You will find rest for your souls” precisely in the midst of your exertions to do your job with excellence for his glory. What is that experience like? I think that’s what Pam’s really asking. What is it like working as hard as you can and, in the very doing of it, experiencing Christ as our soul’s rest? Not just after it, not just before it, but in it — in the very exertion of our life’s work? Here are four ways that we can experience the soul rest of Christ as we are doing our work.

1. Justified by God

First, we work with the sweet assurance that we stand already justified before God — not on the basis of our work, but on the basis of faith alone in Christ’s work — even as we work. How sweet are these words: “Now to the one who works [and he has in mind working for justification, working to get right with God], his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work [for justification, to get right with God] but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5).

If we don’t get this right, nothing will be right. Our souls enjoy the glorious, precious, sweet restfulness of knowing that we are right with God through faith alone and that the work we are doing — sweat on our face, weariness in our bones, exhaustion in our minds — is not done to get right with God. We are delivered from the horrible torment of soul that thinks, “I must work. I must do a good job so that I can get right with God, or so that I can get a right standing before God.” That kind of restlessness, anxiety, and striving is over. The verdict has been rendered by the King of heaven: “Not guilty, my son.” “Not guilty, my daughter.” So, go about your work with a deep restfulness of soul.

2. Loved by God

In Christ, we work hard with the thrilling energy that we are loved by God very personally and forever. Ephesians 2:4 is an amazing verse. Paul says that God’s “great love” — I think it’s the only place in his letters where he uses that very phrase — “made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). That means we were dead, and he made us alive because of love before we did anything to get that love. We do not work with the restless, nervous anxiety of trying to win the affections of a lover that we’re not sure of. If we’re alive in Christ, it was great love that put us there already.

Picture this analogy to feel what it means to work out of the thrilling energy of being loved. Suppose I have been dating Noël — who’s now been my wife for 54 years, but this was true once upon a time — for just several weeks, and I feel very strong affections welling up in me. I’m thinking, “This is the woman I want to marry,” but I’m not sure what her affections are yet. Then the day comes when she needs some heavy lifting done for her as she moves — a dozen boxes or so, books, furniture — from one apartment to another.

I go to her apartment to help her move, and as I start to go down the stairs to where she has everything packed up, she puts her hand on my arm, and I turn to look at her, and she says right into my eyes for the first time, “I love you, Johnny.” What happens to my exhausting work that afternoon? Oh my goodness, there flows into it a thrilling energy of being loved! There is in the exhaustion of the heavy boxes a restfulness of soul, of not wondering anymore, “Am I loved?” I am loved. I am loved!

Of course, the analogy breaks down a little bit because God doesn’t need any help with lifting heavy boxes. I get that, but the principle is the same. He gives me the privilege of serving his purposes in the world, and he takes away all of its burdensomeness by saying, “I love you. I’ve got you. I love you! I choose to love you.”

3. Helped by God

The analogy of Noël’s love, however, is not nearly good enough to capture the point. God’s love doesn’t stand by, like Noël stood by, and watch us lift the boxes of life — watch us do our job at work. He doesn’t stand by and watch, counting on us to muster the energy because we’re loved. His love commits him to help us. He steps into our lives by his Spirit within us and becomes the kind of energy that turns our work into something far greater than mere human achievement, even in response to love. It becomes a kind of God-wrought miracle that gets him praise and touches other people in ways we can’t begin to explain when we’re operating in the strength of God.

“There is a restfulness in work because God is an inexhaustible helper in our work.”

I say this because in 1 Peter 4:11, Peter says, “[Let] whoever serves [you could say works], [serve or work] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” In other words, there is a restfulness in work because God is an inexhaustible helper in our work, so that our energy is really — in a profound sense — his energy supplied to us.

4. Peace in Christ

Therefore, the obstacles that always meet us in our work and that formerly robbed us of peace and restfulness, and filled us with anxiety don’t have that effect anymore, because now we know that “nothing is too hard for [the Lord]” (Jeremiah 32:17). Nothing. He works everything together for our good (Romans 8:28).

For at least those four reasons, we can speak of Christ being our rest — rest for our souls — even in the very exertion of our daily work.