These songs are all on Second Advent themes and were written while working on the Sabbath Rest Advent Church hymnal a few years ago. They are offered freely for the use of all those who look and long for the return of Jesus Christ.
“Amidst the deepening shadows of earth’s last great crisis,
God’s light will shine brightest,
and the song of hope and trust will be heard in clearest and loftiest strains.”
To bring some kind of order into this collection, I have placed the songs into six different categories. Some songs would fit into more than one category though! But for the sake of order, the categories are:
01 ~ The Everlasting Gospel
This is the broadest category and includes all the songs that support the truths we have studied and learned, since the beginning of our church in the early 1960′s, especially those written to accompany one of the themes we studied together.
02 ~ Early Advent Texts
Here are songs that were taken from early Advent songbooks, or from the period of the early to mid 1800′s, especially songs dealing with the return of Jesus Christ. Most of these came from James White’s collection, “Hymns for Second Advent Believers (1852)“. This collection only had words, no music was included. So we have tried to compose music that fit the mood of the songs.
03 ~ Scripture Songs
Here are songs composed for Bible verses. Some of these verses were key texts for themes that we studied in our yearly camp-meetings, and were composed to help place that theme and it’s promises and warnings into the mind and heart. As I get time, I will put up those themes in printed form, and link them to these songs, so you can understand what they were all about.
04 ~ Texts from Ellen White
These songs are based on sentences or paragraphs from the writings of Ellen White (1827-1915). The songs based on her writings fall into two classes:
- Some paragraphs from her writings were paraphrased into poetry, then music was composed to fit.
- A sentence or sentences were taken directly from her writings, and music was composed to fit.
05 ~ Songs for Children
These songs were written especially with children in mind. A few were written to accompany picture books on Bible stories, so that a verse could be sung for each new page. Others have hand signs that accompany the text.
06 ~ General Hymns
These are general hymns of the Christian faith. They differ from the first category (The Everlasting Gospel) in that they were not specifically written to accompany one of the themes we studied at our yearly camp-meetings, or perhaps the scope of the text is not as confined. But they still teach the gospel, often have bits and pieces of our message, and are still useful in the daily walk.
Note: SVG Format
On the music pages, the hymns are available for download in various formats. The SVG format requires the Opus music fonts in order to display properly. These fonts can be obtained by downloading and installing the Scorch web-browser plugin from Sibelius.com.
However, this does not work for computers using the GNU Linux operating system. In that case, you can download the fonts by clicking here: Opus music fonts.
