Text · full lyrics
How oft have sin and Satan strove
To rend my soul from thee, my God!
But everlasting is thy love,
And Jesus seals it with his blood.
The oath and promise of the Lord
Join to confirm his wondrous grace;
Eternal power performs the word,
And fills all heav'n with endless praise.
Amidst temptations sharp and long,
My soul to this dear refuge flies;
Hope is my anchor, firm and strong,
While tempests blow and billows rise.
The gospel bears my spirit up;
A faithful and unchanging God
Lays the foundation for my hope
In oaths, and promises, and blood.
The lyricist
Isaac Watts
Isaac Watts was a Congregationalist minister who spent his working life pastoring an Independent church in London — one of the Nonconformist congregations that stood outside the Church of England — for years at the meeting house on Mark Lane. He grew up inside that tradition, his father jailed more than once for it, and grew impatient with the only church music it permitted: stiff, archaic metrical settings of the Psalms, sung from a worn psalter that one later critic dismissed as written with the best intentions and the worst taste. The story goes that he complained once too often, and his father told him to write something better if he thought he could; the hymn he produced in answer, "Behold the Glories of the Lamb," was the first of more than eight hundred he would write. He spent much of what followed giving the Psalms fresh English settings of his own — which is where "O Bless the Lord, My Soul" comes from, his recasting of Psalm 103 in place of the clumsy older version then in the books.
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