The Messiah Changes Lives!

This week I was reading a article about the life of George Fredrick Handel.
For much of his life he wrote Italian music as a German-English composer. He ran an opera hours that became unpopular and failed. Suffering from overwork and exhaustion, in 1737 Handel had a stroke and became paralyzed. Money problems soon followed, and just as all hope seemed gone someone sent him a libretto, in English, drawn from the bible, about the Savior, the suffering servant of all whose stripes make us whole.
Something about those texts energized him, they gave him heart and purpose once again. Day and night he worked, forgetting to eat or sleep. One friend visited Handel as he was setting the music to the words, "He was despised and and rejected of men," and found him sobbing deeply. After composing the Hallelujah chorus, Handel wrote the words of St. Paul in his journal, paraphrased from 2 Corinthians. "Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it, I know not. God knows!"
This exhausted and beaten man, completed the entire Messiah in three short weeks! How could this happen? What literally, Got into him?
Without a doubt it was the power of the Holy Spirit working through the words of scripture that moved the heart of Handel in amazing ways. Listen to what other great composers had to say:

Frans Joseph Hayden - When he heard the Hallelujah Chorus "wept like a child."
Mozart - "Handel understands effect better than any of us - when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt."
Beethoven - "Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived....I would uncover my head and kneel down at his tomb."

You see Handel's real Messiah heard the cries of a broken German composer-musician, as he lay sick, broken and pennyless and lost. He took a sick old man and made him holy and redeemed.
This was not just another work of music, but a transformation of the man.
Maybe the Messiah wants to take the jumbled, tangled mess of our daily living and bring it all together with the unpredictable workings of the Holy Spirit and create another masterpiece in us!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

Rev. Richard