Oh I need thee every hour

I need thee, O I need thee;

        every hour I need thee;

        O bless me now, my Savior, I come to thee

I need thee every hour; stay thou nearby; 

        temptations lose their power when thou art nigh. 

I need thee every hour; teach me thy will; 

        and thy rich promises in me fulfill.

This song enters my mind most often these days. Words of truth, “I need thee every hour”. I do need Him every single hour. It’s strange to me that as Christians there is a great hyphenation on the first moment one receives Christ, proclaiming Him as Lord of your life. It is a very important point in the walk of a Christ follower, it’s the beginning, but I contend that such a plea for salvation, for a savior is needed every hour of our days.

 Some mornings when I wake I feel a weight sitting on my chest before I even get out of bed. I roll to my right to fall out of bed and reach my hands to the floor to catch me in a bow. “Jesus be King and Lord of my life today, I cannot get through without your reign in my heart.” These are the good days. I gain salvation from the sin that has settled in the night. But I forget somehow that I need Him every hour. I need to re-commit my heart to His allegiance because “temptations lose their power when thou art nigh”. He saves me every day and I must recommit my heart to him hourly.

I remember as a teenager a pastor in our youth group once addressed the idea of losing your salvation. He noted that you cannot lose your salvation (true) but followed that with, “so you don’t need to keep asking God to be Lord of your life, you don’t need to keep praying the sinners prayer”. I was relieved by the first thought that my salvation cannot be lost, but then why did I so frequently feel the need to recommit my life to the Lord. You see I think he got it a little bit wrong. I need to continue to pray the sinners prayer because I am yet a ghastly sinner. I need to proclaim Jesus as Lord every day. I need to tell Jesus that I believe that He is God and that He rose from the grave after being crucified for my sins. Where would I be if I once said these truths and then left them alone for the rest of my days. What if I told my husband once that I love him and that I will never leave him and then never mention it again? These truths of promises and covenants need to be said and honored over and over and over again, if not every hour.

I preach to myself in this area. Where would my heart be if every hour I told myself, I believe in God the Father, the maker of the universe, I believe that Jesus Christ was Gods only son, I believe that he came to earth as a baby to grow and show us the way we should live and that He took my sins and the sins of all humanity in their entirety and died with them on a cross, put them in their grave. I believe that Jesus did not stay dead but that he conquered death and rose to be alive again. I believe that he will return one day to fight the last battle over Satan and that he will win and we will live forever in the presence of God, sinless, free. 

Encouraging right? Truth right? Our lives can be a veil over truth if we let them. We need Jesus to tare the veil every single hour and usher us into the holy of holies where we are now welcome to reside.  

Oh Jesus draw our hearts to you every hour, draw us to our knees. Let us enter into the place where truth resides, through the veil that you tore by taking nails through your hands, into the holy of holies. Where once only one man, one time each year could enter into such a sacred communion with you now is made available to us every single hour. Lord remind our hearts to come. Remind us that you have made yourself available to us each hour of our days, for we need thee every hour.