My God, How Wonderful Thou Art
My God, How Wonderful Thou Art
My God, how wonderful Thou art,
Thy majesty how bright,
How beautiful Thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are Thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
O how I fear Thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship Thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as Thou art,
For Thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
No earthly father loves like Thee;
No mother e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as Thou hast done
With me, Thy sinful child.
How wonderful, how beautiful,
The sight of Thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!
FREDERICK FABER moved from the Anglican church to the Roman Catholic fold at thirty-one. He missed the hymns of Wesley, Newton, and Cowper that had meant so much in his youth. So he wrote 150 hymns over the following eighteen years, including “Faith of Our Fathers” (June 19) and “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” (July 18).
We often use the word wonderful quite carelessly, but Faber was speaking of God as “full of wonder.” It is only when we take time to consider God’s greatness, as Faber does in this hymn, that we truly begin to worship. The hymn takes us step by step through the sense of adoration, of fear, of love, and devotion, as we see all the great attributes of God displayed. The stanza of consecration, often omitted from our hymnals, reads: “Oh, then, this worse than worthless heart in pity deign to take, and make it love Thee for Thyself and for Thy glory’s sake.”
The high and lofty one who lives in eternity, the Holy One, says this: “I live in the high and holy place with those whose spirits are contrite and humble. I restore the crushed spirit of the humble and revive the courage of those with repentant hearts.”
Isaiah 57:15
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