Jesus Paid It All
Jesus Paid It All
I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small!
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain—
He washed it white as snow.
Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r, and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.
For nothing good have I
Whereby Thy grace to claim—
I’ll wash my garments white
In the blood of Calv’ry’s Lamb.
And when before the throne
I stand in Him complete,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
My lips shall still repeat.
WHAT DO YOU DO when the pastor rambles on too long? Elvina Hall wrote a hymn. Seated in the choir loft at the Monument Street Methodist Church of Baltimore, she had no paper to write on—only the flyleaf of the hymnal. There she wrote these stanzas.
The composer of the well-known tune to this hymn, John T. Grape, was the organist and choir director at the church. Professionally, he was a successful coal merchant, but he “dabbled in music,” as he liked to say. He had come up with this tune, which he called “All to Christ I Owe.” His wife liked it, but no one else seemed to.
It was the pastor, George Schrick, who put the words and tune together (we don’t know how he responded to the fact that Hall had been writing while he was preaching). Hall’s stanzas fit part of Grape’s tune, and she probably added the chorus to fit with his tune title.
“Come now, let’s settle this,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.”
Isaiah 1:18
From the book
