Sunday, February 11, 2024

How happy are they…

356 Rapture. 6. 6. 9. D.

1 How happy are they,
   Who the Saviour obey,
   And have laid up their treasure above!
   Tongue cannot express
   The sweet comfort and peace
   Of a soul in its earliest love.

2 That sweet comfort was mine,
   When the favor divine
   I first found in the blood of the Lamb;
   When my heart it believ'd,
   O what joy I receiv'd,
   What a heaven in Jesus's name!

3 'Twas a heaven below
   My Redeemer to know;
   And the angels could do nothing more
   Than to fall at his feet,
   And the story repeat,
   And the lover of sinners adore.

4 Jesus all the day long
   Was my joy and my song;
   O that all his salvation might see!
   He hath loved me, I cried,
   He hath suffer'd and died,
   To redeem such a rebel as me.

5 Oh! the rapturous height
   Of that holy delight
   Which I felt in the life-giving blood!
   By my Saviour possessed,
   I was perfectly blest,
   As if fill'd with the fulness of God.
                         Charles Wesley
                         The Methodist Hymnal 1939 edition

<idle musing>
I don't recall ever singing this hymn, but it is in over 700 hymnals. I have to admit that the theology of this one is pretty thin for a hymn by Wesley. Hymnary.org inserts two verses after verse 4:

5 On the wings of his love
   I was carry'd above
   All sin, and temptation, and pain;
   I could not believe
   That I ever should grieve
   That I ever should suffer again.

6 I rode on the sky,
   Freely justify'd I!
   Nor envy'd Elijah his seat:
   My soul mounted higher
   In a chariot of fire,
   And the moon it was under my feet.

</idle musing>

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