Contents
1 'Then sings my soul'
2 A blank page
3 Power of a word
4 A majestic crescendo
5 A Prayer for cleansing
6 Every prayer must have this!
Chapter 1
'Then Sings My Soul'
Welcome to the ‘front porch.’ There is so much more to be said about God’s greatness than what we can say in one short sitting. But I never go very long between writings that I want to revisit this theme and, in particular, this song.
It think it may be the greatest song ever written—‘How Great Thou Art.’ If not, it’s on that top shelf with the best of the best.
The writer of ‘How Great Thou Art’ understood something about God’s glory and majesty.
He had experienced wonders in God’s handiwork that made him stop right where he was and give God the glory. You might think he stood and looked out over the Grand Canyon—ah, from high up there you can sing ‘Then sings my soul my Savior God to thee’ with vigor, can't you! – or up high on the Smoky Mountains looking deep down into the foothills with the fall leaves shifting from color to color and the cool running Pigeon River churning confidently through it.
Carl Bobert, the Swedish preacher who penned these words in 1886, likely never saw either of those wonders, although he would have plenty of his own to admire in the beautiful landscapes of Sweden. Many scenes there display the glories of God and would cause him to sing, and write:
‘O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made. I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy pow’r throughout the universe displayed.’
The wonder we have of God—as with the song poet here—seems to come in stages.
First, we wonder at God’s greatness, marveling, then we see all that He has made and hear the pow’r of the rolling thunder. Our thoughts, our eyes, our ears all taking in God’s glory.
But there’s something still missing, some sense we possess that we have not yet engaged in our wonder and worship of God—but the writer will not leave it that way for long. As we come to the resounding chorus, he takes the wonder of his soul to new heights, writing,
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; how great Thou art, how great Thou art! Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; how great Thou art, how great Thou art!’
There we go to the depths of our being, down into our very soul. Our wonder looks up to the heights while our emotions reach down to the depths. Our whole being is overwhelmed with God’s glory, as we proclaim from deep in our souls, ‘How great Thou art.’ A single journey through that glad, triumphant refrain is not enough, for we must echo it, its ascending crescendo taking it to even greater heights than before:
“Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; how great Thou art, how great Thou art!”
Thus, we sing today and every day that we live the glory of our Savior and the glory of our God. We acknowledge His greatness in our minds, marvel at it with our eyes, wonder at it with what we hear, and sing it, proclaim it, with all that we have—and all that we are— deep down in our souls.
Then sings my soul!
We sing it then—when we are overwhelmed with the Lord's goodness—we sing it even now, and we sing it every day that we live. It is a glad refrain that will take us all the way home. And there again, in a better place with a better voice, we’ll sing together: ‘How Great, how great, Thou Art’!
Chapter 2
The Blank Page
Sometimes when you begin a study or writing, you meditate a while, then look down and see that all you have is a blank page. I always told my writing students that the scariest thing for a writer may be staring at that blank page. We’ve heard of that, even with classic novelists and poets.
But coming to it as a blank page is how we began these particular contemplations on the great gospel hymn we have before us here. At the start, I wrote to the daughters of one of my best friends Ryan Howell from Birmingham. Ryan lost his battle with a number of setbacks and left us far too early just a few years ago. I sent a picture of that first page with the title alone inscribed in handwriting at the top, ‘How Great Thou Art.’ Nothing more. I knew I might write more, I’m sure, but the words would have to come on their own time.
Fortunately, the words did come; and we are now re-sharing the thoughts that came to us as we reflected on the good life of a great Christian man and a tremendous singer, a natural tenor. As with any writing, the early pages of the essay consisted of more ‘musings’ than anything. But it wasn’t long before I knew the best place to start delving into the power of God: the book of Psalms. Opening up that great book, I paused at several places, able to admire a number of thoughts along the way, thoughts of the wonder of God:
“The Lord knows the way of the righteous,” writes the psalmist regarding the omniscience of God. Psalm 1:6.
Then again:
“I have set my king upon the holy hill of Zion,” says the writer–Psalm 2:6–admiring from afar the glories of Zion, a place of glory not only for the kingdom of Judah but for the coming church of Christ about a millennium just ahead.
We could not help but pause next at the classic eighth psalm:
“O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who hast set thy glory above the heavens … When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him.” Psalm 8:1, 3-4.We remember at the end of that poem that the writer ends just as he had begun:
“O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!”–the opening and the closing serving as bookends that glorify the Lord. Surely, the Lord is the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega.
What a glad refrain the psalmist’s bookends make:
“O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name!’ No greater words and no greater life mission could we declare than these. The psalmist is overwhelmed with God’s excellence much as the song poet who writes in our song, “Then sing my soul, my Savior God to Thee, How great thou art!”
Leaving the eighth Psalm we moved to the nineteenth as the writer admires the glory of the creation: “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” Few things declare the Lord’s greatness more than the grandeur of nature. Our songwriter follows the same theme in the song, marveling at the bountiful creation in one of the verses, that says, “When thru the woods and forest glades I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze.”
There we can almost see the writer with a pen in his hand and a blank sheet of paper, soaking in the beauty of nature’s presence so he can put it on the page.
I think we will always do well to begin our day in just that way, taking in all of the events and thoughts and sights that declare the majesty of God.
Every day is a blank page, and we stroll through the day adding the words that somehow describe a glory that we can only feel when we dig deep down in our souls. We walk through the woods and forest glades, we listen to the birds singing in the trees, we look out over the lofty mountains, we listen to the murmuring of the brook through the woods, we look up at the heavens that declare God’s glory abundantly, we examine the stars and the galaxies and the constellations – and by the time our day is complete, we have a novel, as it were, filled with God’s glories, read over and over, declared to all who will hear, expressed in prayer and praise, and stored down deep in our souls, so much so that we can look up once more before the final moments of the night, and sing, “Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee.”
What a day well spent!
Then we came to something else, just as we scrolled a little further: the one-hundredth and thirty-ninth psalm.
That is where we paused the longest.
Chapter 3
Power of a Word
When we explore the depths of God's greatness, there is no shortage of scriptures and stories that affirm the great truth over and over! The psalmist David pauses himself many times as he considers what all the Lord in His bountiful goodness has done for him. Of all those places, few passages surpass Psalm 139.
Ah, the powerful words! Listen:
“O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.”
Few words or thoughts in the human language compare to this declaration of praise. From the first utterance—“O Lord, you have searched me and known me!”—we stand amazed at the beauty and grandeur of the thoughts. We wonder even more when we come to the end of the psalm and David prays an almost unimaginable prayer: "Lord,” he says, “search me and know me." Few of us are bold enough to pray such a prayer.
I had been thinking about the power of words when I recently ran across a speech by Paul Harvey in a final dissertation he gave to a large committee of journalists. At one point in his speech, he points out that it has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but then he adds, “Can anyone tell me what the author of the quotation looks like?” Of course no one could, yet his words have lived for hundreds of years.
Mr. Harvey proves his point with eloquent words as he reflects on the thousands of pictures he has drawn in the minds of listeners through the decades in his newscasts and “The Rest of the Story” series, drawing vivid pictures without even one stroke from a paint brush other than the brush of words:
“You trust me to paint pictures on the mirror of your mind,” he says in his classic Paul Harvey voice, “and I will let you feel such agony and ecstasy, such misery and such magnificence as you would never be able to feel by looking at it.”
Oh, what a writer or a speaker can do with the power of words! As beautiful as the prose of such wordsmiths as Paul Harvey, their words can only ascend to a certain height when compared to words that a man like the psalmist David can write in glorifying the Lord.
David explores God's greatness in sublime language and thought that take us far into the recesses of our finite minds. Alongside the psalmist, we say today, too:
Lord, you indeed know when we sit down, day by day, and you know as soon as we rise up. You read every thought from faraway, from Your great white throne that sits before a glassy sea like crystal.
You know the path that lies before us and the one behind us, a pathway You foresaw in Your great Providence even before you formed us in our mother's womb. Even our stumbling along the pathway does not deter from Your watch and care over us. The paths of our lives—both past and future—are as one to You.
You know, Lord, when we grow tired and must sit down to rest, and You know when we are able to arise to be about the race that is set before us. You discern our thoughts from a million miles away, which, to us, is how far Your majestic throne is from our earthly path.
This we know, too: You search our steps so often, just to make sure they are safe. Every step we take, and every word that leaves our tongue, You know completely—whether they be blessed words of praise that ascend to Your heavenly throne or the words misspoken here below. Even then, You stand ready to forgive.
Yes, Lord, that you pause even to consider us, to search, to watch, and to know us—in those wonders we stand in awe of You, O Lord our Lord.
Chapter 4
A Majestic Crescendo
The psalmist in his one-hundredth and thirty-ninth psalm begins with one of the greatest and most stark statements about God’s omniscience probably that the human mind can conceive.
“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.”
Ponder on that a while. We know ourselves. The Lord knows us better. That’s hard to fathom.
David’s opening thesis is but the introduction to a lengthy examination of just how deep the Lord’s knowledge of him goes. What a list the psalmist comprises!
He begins with that one anthem of praise, then he builds upon his powerful premise by laying one thought upon another, so that, one by one, each building on the previous, his anthem of praise builds into a majestic crescendo.
It reminds me of how we sing the song that serves here as our great theme. We begin from the depths of our hearts declaring how impactful the signs around us are on our lives: “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made. We see the stars, we hear the rolling thunder, Your power throughout the universe displayed.” Those beautiful reflections then triumph into a rare anthem of praise in the chorus that builds and builds until the last words are a thundering of voices raised as high as the sky singing, “How Great Thou Art.”
It's amazing how words fail to describe such a song. Fortunately, few readers here are unable to hear the singing of it in our minds, and, thus, understands.
David’s song poem builds the same way. The Lord, he begins, knows when we sit down and we arise. He knows every word that flows from our tongue, even before the thought ever comes to our minds. He knows our most remote and unguarded thoughts. He goes with us in His omnipresence even should we go into the darkness of Hades or enter the glorious light of heaven.
Then, switching to another image, he expresses how the Lord knows us even when our little bodies are being formed in the womb—the smallest of universes—and He takes note of our members and the manner in which they are being fashioned. I imagine the Lord looking down and counting those little toes and fingers the way a mama and daddy do, pulling back the blanket, reaching for the clinched fists, and opening up the little hand to make sure they formed complete in that magnificent universe in which they dwelt for months.
Thinking on that idea, we note that the Lord knows more than our physical makeup, although even that is not apart from His purpose. As He asks Moses, rhetorically, “Who made your mouth?” The Lord is the Creator, the Designer, and Author and the Finisher in the forming of our bodies.
But He goes deeper. He knows the purpose He has for us, He knows the work He would have us to do, and He knows and is satisfied by the blessings that He will freely bestow upon us in the passing of time.
He knows us through and through.
It is easy to carry the great hymn with us, singing it along during the day, when we consider all the worlds our Lord has made, including us, individually, created and formed for His glory.
No wonder David marveled at God’s greatness in Psalm 139, and no wonder we do the same in our thoughts and meditations today.
These thoughts made me realize something. Should every member of a church make it their daily purpose to set aside time to meditate on these things throughout our day, every day, how strong will that church be!
Chapter 5
A Prayer for Cleansing
When we pause at Psalm 139, we come face to face with one of the most amazing prayers I have ever heard. We understand the power in the opening of the prayer with David’s “Lord, you have searched me and known me,” followed by a long list of ways in which the Lord has shown his omnipresence in our lives. But David goes a step further at the end. I wonder if he—at first—intended to go to that next step; but thought leads to thought—as we know in writing—and the depth of the psalmist’s thought leads to a phenomenal conclusion and prayer:
“Search me, O God,” he prays, “and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts”—then adds, “And see if there be any wicked way in me.”
I have paused at that thought a long time, and I’ve wondered if I am courageous enough to pray that prayer. It is one thing for us to acknowledge that the Lord searches us and knows us like the very back of His hand, as we say. It is something else for us to ask the Lord to search us. In fact, my human inclination is for me to hope the Lord doesn’t look too deeply, that perhaps just a glance at me might disguise my faults and shortcomings. At a glance, I have a chance to come off looking pretty good, maybe. But a deeper look, a look like peering into the ocean’s depths—that search certainly cannot bode well for me. My only other prayer would be that should He choose to peer deeply into my soul that He would take the blood of Jesus Christ with Him as a deep cleaning would be necessary.
Recently the amazin’ blonde and I went out to our red barn to clean it out after many, many months of piling things in it. You know we did not enter it with nothing but a Kleenex. It was going to need some heavy gloves and a great deal of patience. When the Lord searches us, we expect He has both, too, figuratively.
What the psalmist prays clearly is both wonderful and frightening. After gathering ‘into a heap’ all the ways in which God’s glory excels, says one writer, gathering “all the rays, as it were, into one burning point,” he steps almost off of a cliff with that next breath: “Search me, O God!”
What a plunge for the Lord’s servant! In Your greatness and omnipotence, my prayer is that you will focus your all-knowingness and all-presentness into my heart. You have searched me before—that much I know all too well—and you have known me. But, Lord, don’t stop there. Proceed with your Spirit to dig down deep into my soul and see what all is there. Don’t hold back your examination of me.
It is one of the rarest requests and curious prayers we’ll ever see.
When I pause at it, one of the first thoughts that always comes to me is what would cause David’s soul to cry out such a request. It comes, clearly, from deep in his soul, just as when we sing, “Then sing my soul …” and realize that our words from our voice originate from something deep down in our souls.
Then it hits me: The prayer is for cleansing. It is not that the psalmist does not know his own weaknesses and frailties. He knows them too well. He knows exactly what the Lord is going to find when He searches his soul, and he knows it is not all good. It probably is more bad than good, in fact.
What else could we expect an examination with the great Surgeon’s scalpel would reveal? Envy, bitterness, unforgiveness, lust, pride, selfishness, self-sufficiency, ingratitude—ay, the list goes on and on. There are enough shortcomings beneath the surface that it is no wonder we often hide the inner part of our being from the outside world.
But hiding his faults is not what the psalmist is desiring to do. Not here in Psalm 139. It is just the opposite. He desires that the God Who knows all things will delve into his character and bring to the surface all the things that He finds lacking. Why would he pray such a prayer knowing the result?
Only for one reason.
He prays it because he knows that the only way he can have the true cleansing that comes from the Lord is to have Him do the search. The master Surgeon is not only going to perform the operation to detect the problems. He will rectify the issues, even a human surgeon will do. He will take out the diseased tissue and the malignant tumor. He will remove all the things that are contaminating his weary patient. He is going to cleanse him. We know this perhaps even better than David did himself, for we know that the Lord will cleanse us with the precious blood of Christ, the blood that flows continuously on our behalf—1 John 1:7. We have that blessing because we have come into contact with that blood by being baptized into Jesus Christ and because we have continued to walk in the light and continued searching diligently for righteousness, even though we find that righteousness sometimes elusive (Matt. 5:6).
Perhaps it is true that we have planted our feet on higher ground when we can make such an honest request of the Lord—“Search me, O God.” That is our hope. Really, that is our prayer.
March 17, 2025
Chapter 6:
Every Prayer must have this!
Chapter 6
“Search me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting”—Psalm 139:23-24.
Again, six sessions into our meditations on just a piece of this great prayer leave us shaking our head at its wonder!
But there’s more.
The word “search” in that language is an emphatic and picturesque word. It means to dig deep. It is a prayer for the Lord to lay his inmost nature bare for the world to see—at least, for God to see in His omniscience and then show to him. That is a meeting I cringe to think of being a part of. To make sure the cleansing is complete, he wants the Lord to go deep down into the earth until he reaches the very bedrock. Bring all of what you find to the light, even the rust and the dregs.
Note that the prayer is two-fold. Lord, search me, first. Then he adds, “and know me,” or know “my heart,” which is the true “me,” right?
But then we realize that it is not a matter of the Lord’s not knowing him already. We know that the Lord knew him before he ever breathed his first breath. Remember, He counted his little-bitty fingers and toes before he ever stepped out into this world. The Lord knows the psalmist David through and through, an incontrovertible truth that tells me that David’s intent here is more than a desire for the Lord to know him.
In fact, when we learn this part of David’s intent it will reveal something very special in the great servant, something we will need if we are to be able to pray such a prayer ourselves.
Part one, yes, it’s a prayer for cleansing.
But, part two, it is a prayer of humility, a humility that will be crucial for us to attain if we ever, ever hope to have any hope to have the Lord look down into the bedrock of our souls and to walk away satisfied.
David’s prayer for the Lord to search him, to know him, to try him, and to know his thoughts—that prayer is nothing less than a lowly acknowledgement of himself. It is the publican who could not so much as look upward to heaven to pray but could merely smote his chest and say, “Lord, be merciful to me, I’m just a wayward sinner.”
It occurs to me now that prayer can be many things. So far it is a beautiful declaration to God’s greatness—His omniscience, His omnipresence, and His omnipotence—and it is a prayer for cleansing because any man who truly puts himself side by side with God walks away with the words of Peter, “Lord, depart from me, I’m a sinful man.” The best way to see how small we ourselves really are is to work really hard at seeing how great God is. If you see God’s greatness, then our smallness is as easy to see as the sun shining in its strength at midday.
But now we learn something else. The prayer of Psalm 139 is a form of a confession. Lord, he is saying, I know that I am not much. I lay no claim to being great in any way. I do not even claim to be right, because I know that I’m wrong some every day and even every hour. I know well my frailties, failures, and faults. And I’ve searched myself enough to know that when you get an inch below the surface—“Lord, I know You don’t have to go all the way down to the bedrock to see more than You want to see—and you see the true me, that you are going to see how much I’m lacking.
“Lord, it would not surprise me if you looked at me, shook your head, and said, “David, you have been weighed in the balances and you’ve been found wanting.”
Then we pause once more, lift our head to get a clearer picture in our minds of what the psalmist is saying, and realize that—despite all of that—David prayed the prayer anyway.
Somehow, I can’t help but smile at that.
March 24, 2025
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