Updating an Ancient Hard Edged Hymn, 12/15/2023
In 1542, Martin Luther published his classic hymn “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word,” the original version of which began
“Lord, keep us in thy Word and work,
Restrain the murderous Pope and Turk,
Who fain would tear from off thy throne
Christ Jesus, thy beloved Son.”
He penned these words in 1541 in response to a call to prayer by church leaders over the then imminent Muslim invasion of Vienna, the culmination of a dozen years of steady Islamic conquest of Christian lands and forces. After that particular threat subsided he edited the verse to broadened its reach:
“Lord, keep us in thy Word and work,
Curb those who by deceit or sword
Would wrest the kingdom from your Son
And bring to naught all He has done.”
Most Americans don’t know that Martin Luther was such a huge figure in Danish history that the Constitution of Denmark had, until recently, required all Danish laws to comport with Lutheranism, its state religion. I only learned this fact during a seminal battle against today’s greatest threat to Christendom: LGBTism.
A few years ago I was asked to hold a Bible conference in Bournemouth England where by divine appointment I met the inimitable Pastor Jonny Noor and and a Danish countryman who had joined him in partnership to defend their nation after Jonny’s Christian radio broadcast (from his home in the Negev Desert in Israel) condemned the then-recent “legalization” of “gay marriage” in Denmark. A trio of morally corrupt government officials, led by Govt. Minister Manu Sareen, had ramrodded “gay marriage” into law in typical lawless fashion, blatantly violating Section Four of the Danish constitution.
Greatly distraught, and burdened by the pessimism of several lawyers who predicted that overturning “gay marriage” by appeal to the constitution would be nearly impossible, these two Christian soldiers were brought to my Bible conference by a British Christian activist who had met them in Germany, where they were traveling as pilgrims seeking the Lord’s guidance. We enjoyed several days of anointed Holy-Spirit enrichment and excellent fellowship, including strategic brainstorming about the way forward. This included the input of one of the top international law attorneys of England and other sharp Christian minds. But, of course, it was to no avail – the LGBT’s conquered the Danish government like the Muslim’s conquered Constantinople and immediately began crushing all internal dissent, while marching on to their next target, Finland.
The first of the state churches to fall to the “Gays” was the Anglican Church of England, whose stand for biblical morality had been strongly bolstered by the cornerstone of modern human rights jurisprudence, the Magna Carta. The first demand of that incredible document (a copy of the original I personally viewed at Salisbury Cathedral) states in pertinent part: “the English Church shall be free.” That juridical foundation-stone served as a bulwark against all threats to the biblical worldview in English law for eight centuries until the rise of so-called “Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) erupted like oozing sores on the British body politic, somehow trumping biblical morality.
I played a small part in that battle, as well, by divine appointment spending a night with my family at the home of David Anderson in Edenborough, Scotland on the very weekend he was tasked with writing a policy paper against the repeal of Paragraph 28 banning the promotion of LGBT issues to schoolchildren in the UK. We only met David, who happened to be the head of the Scottish Evangelical Alliance, because we stopped to chat with one of his church members that day who was passing out gospel tracts downtown. That parishioner then, impromptu, arranged for our stay at Dr. Anderson’s home. That very night we hammered out a great policy paper. But, again, using political dirty tricks, the LGBTs prevailed over the Christians in the British Parliament on that issue, striking down Paragraph 28, leading directly to today’s horrific pandemic of sexual deviance among UK schoolchildren.
Similarly, the first demand, nay, MANDATE upon government of our Bill of Rights to the US Constitution was “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It was proposed and passed by the very men who were printing and distributing Bibles as school books on behalf of the government, funded by the treasury. I’ve written extensively on this theme https://www.scottlively.net/2018/09/18/the-coadjuvancy-of-church-and-state/ And yet, with no legal grounding in four thousand years of jurisprudence globally, having merely been DEEMED a category of human rights by the wishful proclamation of special interest groups in the 20th Century, the First Amendment fell to the “Gays” as easily as the Magna Carta had done. America’s natural family and marriage-based societal immune system collapsed and now our country is so morally disease-ridden and crawling with parasites of every kind we may not survive.
As the Bible warns Psalm 12:8: “The wicked prowl on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.”
In 1542, Martin Luther specifically named the human foes of Christendom to give believers a specific target for their prayers. When those prayers were answered, he changed the target to include any other threats that might arise. I think it is time to update Luther’s hymn to again specify the chief enemy of the church. That enemy is the LGBT “movement” which is in reality an army of conquest. Just like the Islamists they dream of global conquest, show no moral or ethical restraint in their wars of aggression, enslave and indoctrinate every person they conquer (and all their descendants from that moment forward), and after each victory re-purpose every institution, technology and asset into weapons of war against the next target. Exactly like the “Borg” of Star Trek but in real life.
So I offer the following two-stanza revision to update Luther’s ancient hymn.
Lord, keep us in thy Word and way,
Restrain the grasping Trans and Gays,
Who fain would steal our every lamb,
to blind them to the great “I AM.”
Aloft our spires restore the cross, redeem for us the souls we’ve lost, cast down the sullied rainbow flag, that mark of Babylon’s leprous hag.
To end on a more positive note, I’ll close with this link to one of the fruits of my partnership with Jonny Noor – the music video titled The Rainbow Belongs to God.”
