How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?How shall we sing Jehovah’s song In a foreign land?
4 sermons cite this verse
… why don't you sing some of the songs of Zion like you used to groove to back in Jerusalem? And they said, how we going to sing the Lord's song in a strange land? Remix it, Freddie Haynes. How we going to groove in Babylon like we did in Jerusalem? The book lets us know they've lost their groove. They caught an ale and they're living in the hell of having failed. I'm hanging out right there because somebody's looking at me right now. I pulled up to your address and listen, ain't nobody judging you because all of us have failed. Don't you look down your nose of snobbery at anybody around you because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. All we like sheep have gone astray. All of us have made some choices we'd like to take back and gone with some people we wish we had never met. All of us have been some places we wish we had never gone. All of us have caught the ale of having failed. …
… sarcasm? Break out one of those great songs you love to sing. Sing for us now. They were as silent as you're sitting at this moment. And he adds, how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land. It's as if you and I were taken captive this next week and marching toward the place where we will be imprisoned. One of our captors said, sing us one of those church songs. Harmonize, blessed assurance. Jesus is mine. Let's hear that one. How about, and can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Sing that one written by Wesley. Sing that song. and a mighty fortress is our God. We'd hang our instruments on the willow. You can't sing the Lord's song in a foreign land. Interesting thing about the suffering that I have seen in hospital rooms and bed chambers of the dying. I never hear songs. I hear prayers. But the song is gone. That's Job's point here. My harp that once played the great songs our family loved to sing and the flute. …
… And the Bible says they hung their harps on the willows and said, how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? Anybody want to testify that you've been there on that job and say, how am I getting my praise on working under Satan himself? How am I going to get my praise on when I am depressed and distressed? Every now and then we find that praise is beaten out of us. Listen, she says, how about when you want to go somewhere but can't go anywhere? I think I'll stop right there. Have you ever felt circumscribed by your circumstances? And as a consequence here is what Sophia says. I was feeling down. I was feeling mighty low and somebody is listening to me right now. I just pulled up to your address and you are in church. You are online but feeling mighty low because of what happened in the last chapter. Well, that ain't the end of the story because that is exactly what Habakkuk felt in the last chapter. …
We've noticed that the question that was facing those Jews who had been deported into Babylon was the question, how do we sing the Lord's song in a strange and foreign land? Now, what they were experiencing at this point in history had been experienced much early in their history in the case of one man who had been exiled and deported to a foreign country. But in his case, he was alone. He didn't have the communion of saints to support him in his captivity. And I'm thinking, of course, of the life of Joseph in the Old Testament when he had been sent into the land of Egypt, ended up in jail for many, many years, and the thing that was able to catapult him from a position of powerlessness in exile to being elevated to the realm of the prime minister of the land of Egypt was his God-given gift of the interpreting of dreams. We remember that that which liberated Joseph from his condition was the occasion when Pharaoh had a dream that disturbed him, and he couldn't understand it. …