A wonderful example of spontaneous song during a worship conference in Jarvenpaa, Finland.
Recently, I was in Finland giving a worship conference in Jarvenpaa. I was about to teach on finding the Seed of God in a song, but before I started, they sang a song that I recognized. It was ‘Come, Now is the Time to Worship’. But of course in Finnish. They had this great word at the beginning. Instead of ‘come’ they said ‘nyt’ (spelling unknown but pronounced like the lizard: newt). I thought, ‘I can sing that! Plus I have a lot of scriptures for ‘come’ that I could tie into this and let Jesus do His work.’ I kept the worship team going up there and started singing the song again from the piano: ‘Nyt’ I would sing and they would sing the rest of the line. Then ‘nyt’ again. It was actually sort of fun.
Then I told them about the English word for ‘nyt’ being ‘come’ and how Jesus wanted us to ‘come away’, etc. They started laughing at me and told me ‘nyt’ didn’t mean ‘come’ it meant ‘now’! Oh…well, that’s a different thing isn’t it? Okay, so I started to sing ‘now is the time for Finland’ and we went on with ‘nyt’ and ‘Suomi’ (Finland). But I started to hear something in the melody of ‘Come Now is the Time’. The first eight notes were shaped a certain way in the key of D that I couldn’t shake. I heard those notes reformed into their national hymn, ‘Finlandia’. So I started to play that wonderful melody on the piano and they broke loose into singing and dancing and waving the Finnish flag. Then we went back and forth between ‘Come Now is the Time’ and ‘Finlandia’ and spontaneous songs about ‘now is the time for Finland’. That is hearing the Seed of God in a melody. It calls us by faith into new territory and creates His new Song overall.
The amazing end of this story is when the pastor of the church took my wife and I back to the hotel that night, he was reflecting on the song ‘Finlandia’. He thought it was great the way I tied the words of all the songs together. I asked him what the words were in English. He was shocked that I didn’t know. He assumed I did since they were so perfect: O Finland, behold, thy daylight now is dawning…! Jesus gave me the right song, the right words and the right melody for a wonderful worshiping group in Finland. Trust Jesus. He has some great words to show you.
Here is the translation of the first verse, note the 'now' throughout!
Finland, behold, thy daylight now is dawning,
the threat of night has now been driven away.
The skylark calls across the light of morning,
the blue of heaven lets it have its way,
and now the day the powers of night is scorning:
thy daylight dawns, O Finland of ours!
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