To God Be the Glory
Fanny Crosby, blind from a young age writes about the wonder she looks forward to when she sees Jesus. Plus she writes of salvation and the glory God deserves in this favourite hymn - which was almost forgotten until Billy Graham revived it.
Are you ready for another Friday Classic Hymn? Lately online, I've been reading about people who don't like any of the new Christian music. In some of the groups where I post, they say, "Oh, it's all rubbish, only the hymns are great." I think differently. I love some of the new Christian music. I love some of the hymns. Some of the hymns aren't great, some of the new stuff isn't great. You've got to find the stuff that glorifies God and makes your soul soar—it doesn't matter if it's old or new. But I love doing Friday Classics because there are some amazing old songs that were written a long time ago that we should still be singing today.
This one is unusual because, unlike the others that I've done in this series—which were written and pretty much became popular instantly and stayed popular—this one sort of faded into obscurity shortly after it was written. It was many years afterwards that somebody else picked it up and said, "This is a great song, we should start doing it." Now it's become extremely popular.
"To God Be the Glory"—can you imagine a time when "To God Be the Glory" wasn't popular? But this is the case. I have a memory of singing this at my uncle's funeral, and it was hearing it there that made me bring it to the band. We ended up recording and releasing it on our first Crossroad album. We've sung it in many churches as we've travelled around with Crossroad, and even though we've kind of modernised the arrangement, we've kept the same melody. It's just popular everywhere we go. When you get into the chorus, everybody lifts up their hands and sings. I think it's because these words and the melody are very, very powerful. So let's look at where the song came from.
The Story Behind "To God Be the Glory"
This is another song written by the famous hymn writer Fanny Crosby. She wrote the lyrics in 1875, it seems, and the tune was written by William Doane. She used to write for him quite a bit—they had a good partnership going there, writing good songs together. I've already told Fanny Crosby's story in my Blessed Assurance video, so be sure to click on that and hear who she was and how she became a hymn writer. She was blinded at a young age but always had a very positive outlook and wrote the most spectacular hymns.
Many people say that this hymn is different from her others because she tended to focus on your personal relationship with Jesus and your personal experience of God. This is one of her few hymns that really fixes your eyes firmly on God and God alone. It describes Him, what He's done—that's it. It's unlike some of the other stuff that she's written. However, it really is a fantastic piece of poetry.
Even so, it kind of disappeared. It wasn't published in the famous hymn books of the day in the late 1800s. It seemed to not really catch anybody's attention. This makes me wonder how many other great hymns of hers are lost, and how many other great hymns have just been forgotten. Maybe this is why I'm doing the Canaan Melodies project that some of you have seen. I'm recording all the old hymns from the Church of the Nazarene's 1914 hymnal, and most of them are not well known at all. They've been totally forgotten, but they're gems.
"To God Be the Glory" is a gem, but nobody really knew this until the 1950s. It was in the 1950s, when Billy Graham began doing his great evangelistic work all around the world, that somebody suggested to him that he use this song. In a crusade in London, he brought the song out and everybody loved it. Everybody thought it was amazing. So the next year, when he went on another crusade, he kept this song in the setlist. Wherever they went, people loved it. Next thing we know, the song is played all over the world because it's very singable, it's very powerful, and it's just kept up its popularity over the years.
Thank God for hymns like this that are really powerful and teach us about Him. I wonder what other hymns are going to be rediscovered in years to come that maybe at the time went unnoticed but then changed the world. Let's have a look at the words of this great hymn and see what it is that makes it so popular.
What Do the Lyrics of "To God Be the Glory" Mean?
Verse 1
Verse 1 starts with those famous words: "To God be the glory." Stop there. To God be the glory—that's what life is all about. It reminds me of Paul saying, "Whatever you do, do it to the glory of God." That's what life is about. Life is about giving God glory. When we put Him in His rightful place, that's when everything else falls into place.
"To God be the glory, great things He hath done."
If you had to think about all the great things God has done, of course He deserves the glory. It's not just because He is wonderful in the sense that He's big and powerful and great—it's what He's done that makes Him worthy of our praise and our glory. Supremely, what He's done is love the world.
"So loved He the world that He gave us His Son, Who yielded His life in atonement for sin."
You can just hear John 3:16 in that: "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." That's exactly what she's saying here. Jesus gave up His life so that He could atone for our sins. By His death on the cross, our sins are forgiven.
"And opened the life-gate that all may go in."
I love how she says "opened the life-gate"—that's a cool phrase. The life-gate. There's a gate to real life, to life in abundance—not only life eternal in heaven one day, but full and abundant life on Earth where our hearts are satisfied in God. Jesus opened that gate by dying for us. All we need to do is place our faith in Him and we find life. We can walk through that life-gate, and all may go in who place their faith in Christ.
The Chorus
The chorus goes like this: "Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice; Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the people rejoice."
I've got memories of singing this in churches, and when we get to this point, people just lift up their hands. There's something about singing that melody that makes people want to express their praise for God and just lift up their hands in worship. It's wonderful.
God, of course, deserves our praise. Praising something means valuing it, or giving it worth, or describing or declaring how amazing it is. When we say "Praise the Lord," we're saying God is amazing. We give Him the glory. "Let the earth hear His voice"—let all the earth know that God is alive and hear Him and come to Him.
"Let the people rejoice"—yes! When we come to know God, of course we rejoice. It resonates deep in our hearts and we can rejoice truly.
The chorus goes on to say: "Oh, come to the Father, through Jesus the Son, And give Him the glory; great things He hath done."
Come to God. There's only one way—it's through the Son, it's through Jesus. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through Me." It's only through Jesus that we get to know God. Without Jesus in the picture, we don't have God the Father.
Will you come to the Father through Jesus the Son? Will you place your faith in the Son, in Jesus, and in His death on the cross and find your peace? Give Him glory and find joy as you do. Great things He has done—He has given us His Son, and so we can come to the Father. Praise the Lord for that.
Verse 2
Verse 2 says this: "Oh, perfect redemption, the purchase of blood, To every believer the promise of God."
That's a great little couplet. Perfect redemption—God redeems us perfectly, restores us perfectly. Of course, whilst we're still on Earth, we will be frail and we will be fragile. Our bodies will deteriorate. But we will be glorified one day when we reach heaven through Jesus. We will be glorified. We'll receive our new bodies, bodies where we are perfectly redeemed.
"The purchase of blood"—that's an interesting phrase. She talks about this being a promise for every believer, and that means God promised that every believer who is captive in the world and in the devil will be purchased, will be freed. God paid the price of His Son's blood so that we could be purchased back, we could be freed back from the enemy. Jesus talked about giving His life as a ransom, and in the New Testament that's a phrase that's often used to describe what Jesus did. He offered Himself up as a payment. His blood was a payment so that you and I could go free.
Have you accepted this promise as your own? You can go free and you can draw near to God because of what Jesus did.
"The vilest offender who truly believes, That moment from Jesus a pardon receives."
This is one of my favourite song lines ever. It doesn't matter how far you've gone, it doesn't matter how vile you've been. This came to my mind the other day when a friend phoned me and said someone had asked about whether Hitler, if he wanted forgiveness, would he have received it? It stunned him. He didn't know what to say.
My answer to him was: if he truly believed and truly wanted forgiveness and wanted to be right with God and wanted to live a holy life and wanted to be made right with God, then yes, even the vilest offender can find grace. Jesus died on the cross. In Jesus' death, God's judgement was satisfied. In other words, all the sins of the world for those who repent can be piled on Jesus and they can be forgiven—even the sins of a Hitler or some of the other evil people that we think of when we think of evil.
But you know what? This is not just for the big famous murderers. What about for you? Have you ever felt too vile, too far gone for God to forgive you? It doesn't matter who you are—in Christ there is forgiveness. There is pardon. In other words, there is forgiveness for you, for your sins.
I hope that you know this. I hope that you know the forgiveness of your sins. Christ died so that you don't have to live in shame, so that you can give yourself to Him and live in His ways and find freedom from that shame. The vilest offender can come and find it if they truly believe.
Do you truly believe? Do you truly believe that Jesus is God's Son who died on the cross for you? Well then, your sins will be forgiven and you can go free and live a good life in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Verse 3
Verse 3 goes like this: "Great things He hath taught us, great things He hath done, And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son."
I like that. He's taught us great things by His life and through the Word. He has done great things, as she's already proclaimed a few times in the song. So great is our rejoicing! Oh, what a sad thing it is when Christians don't rejoice in God, when they just try to use Him for a bit of washing away of their guilt but don't ever find that they are joyful in Him.
The Christian life is about throwing yourself on God and loving Him because of what He's done. If you truly understand what He's done for you, you're going to love Him more than anything, and that's going to affect everything in your life. It's going to make you rejoice, that's for sure.
"But purer, and higher, and greater will be Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see."
These last two lines are very powerful. I've also seen it as "our wonder, our rapture" and "our wonder, our worship," but just forget about that for a second and think about those last three or four words: "when Jesus we see."
Here was a lady who was blind from a very young age, writing what a great thing it will be when we see Jesus. I can picture her coming into His presence, seeing Him, and just rejoicing with tears.
I like what she says in this last verse. She says, yes, we have great rejoicing now, but when we see Him one day, our rejoicing will be purer and higher and greater. She says "our wonder, our transport"—isn't that an amazing word to think of? What happens when we die? We get transported to another place. Our wonder, our rapture, our rapturous worship. When we see Him, it's going to be overwhelming, because we know just what God did for us.
We'll surely get back into that chorus when we see Him and go, "Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice, let the people rejoice!"
Conclusion
What a hymn. What a wonderful hymn. It really describes the Christian message in a strong way. I hope that you are praising God even now as you've heard these words. Praise Him and marvel at the God whom these words are describing.
If you enjoyed this breakdown of "To God Be the Glory," please consider subscribing to my channel for more Friday Classic Hymn analyses. You can also support this ministry through Patreon or PayPal. Be sure to check out my daily devotions and the Canaan Melodies project, where I'm preserving these precious hymns for future generations.
References
"To God Be the Glory" - Written by Fanny Crosby (1875), Music by William Doane
