The choir is singing this song on Sunday. What an incredible song. I remember singing this while I was on the Praise Team at Falls Creek Youth camp, and literally having thousand of voices and tongues singing praise to God. Incredible times of worship. I shared the following with the choir in a weekly email, after I read the following story behind this song. It kind of made ask “what am I doing to remember all that God has done in my life through the transforming power of Jesus”. My hope is to celebrate what Christ has done through my daily life, in a way that brings Him glory, and draws others closer to Him. Take some time to remember all God has done for you, and how He has rescued you.
Story Behind the Song
Charles Wesley the writer of this song, was suffering a bout of pleurisy in May, 1738, while he and his brother were studying under the Moravian scholar Peter Böhler in London . At the time, Wesley was plagued by extreme doubts about his faith. Taken to bed with the sickness on May 21 Wesley was attended by a group of Christians who offered him testimony and basic care, and he was deeply affected by this. He read from his Bible and found himself deeply affected by the words, and at peace with God. Shortly his strength began to return. He wrote of this experience in his journal and counted it as a renewal of his faith; when his brother John had a similar experience on the 24th, the two men met and sang a hymn Wesley had written in praise of his renewal. One year from the experience, Wesley was taken with the urge to write another hymn, this one in commemoration of his renewal of faith. This hymn took the form of an 18-stanza poem, beginning with the opening lines 'Glory to God, and praise, and love,/Be ever, ever given' and was published in 1740 and entitled 'For the anniversary day of one's conversion'. The seventh verse, which begins, 'O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing', and which now is invariably the first verse of a shorter hymn recalls the words of Peter Böhler who said, 'Had I a thousand tongues I would praise Him with them all.' The hymn was placed first in John Wesley's A Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists published in 1780. It appeared first in every (Wesleyan) Methodist hymnal from that time until the publication of Hymns and Psalms in 1983.
O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing.mp3
