Scripture Verse

Introduction

Origin of the Hymn

[This song] was writ­ten ve­ry near to my home in the mount­ains of North Ca­ro­li­na. In the sum­mer of 1915 the fa­mous ev­an­gel­ist Dr. J. Wil­bur Chap­man was preach­ing at the Pres­by­ter­ian con­fer­ence grounds at Mon­treat.

With him were the song lea­der Charles M. Al­ex­an­der, so­lo­ist Al­bert Brown, and their pi­an­ist Hen­ry Bar­ra­clough.

Barraclough, the au­thor of this hymn, was a twen­ty-four-year-old Brit­ish­er; he had met Chap­man the pre­vi­ous year dur­ing a preach­ing mis­sion in Eng­land.

During the con­fer­ence, the ev­an­gel­ist spoke one ev­en­ing on the forty-fifth Psalm [in 1893, Chap­man had writ­ten a book called Iv­ory Pal­ac­es of the King].

He be­lieved, as I do, that this is a pro­phe­tic, Mes­si­an­ic psalm which speaks of the re­la­tion­ship of Christ, the bride­groom, to his bride, the church…

After the ev­en­ing service, Char­lie Al­ex­an­der and He­nry Bar­ra­clough drove some friends to the Blue Ridge YMCA Hos­tel a few miles aw­ay.

Sitting in the front seat of the car, young Bar­ra­clough thought about the mes­sage and the four short phras­es of the re­frain be­gan to take shape in his mind.

When they stopped at a li­ttle vi­llage store, he quick­ly wrote them down on a vis­it­ing card—the on­ly pa­per that was avail­able.

Returning to the con­fer­ence ho­tel, he worked out the first three stan­zas, us­ing the out­line of Chap­man’s mes­sage.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing Mrs. Al­ex­an­der and Mr. Brown sang the new hymn in the Mon­treat con­fer­ence ses­sion.

Billy Gra­ham, in Bar­rows, p. 25