O Lord, our strength in weakness

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O Lord, our strength in weakness

Author: Christopher Wordsworth (1881)
Published in 19 hymnals

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Representative Text

1 O Lord, our strength in weakness,
We pray to Thee for grace;
For pow'r to fight the battle,
For speed to run the race;
When Thy baptismal waters
Were poured upon our brow,
We then were made Thy children,
And pledged our earliest vow.

2 We then were sealed and hallowed
By Thy life-giving Word,
Were made the Spirit's temples,
And members of the Lord;
With His own blood He bought us,
And made the purchase sure;
His are we: may He keep us
Forever chaste and pure.

3 Conformed to His own likeness
May we so live and die,
That in the grave our bodies
In holy peace may lie,
And at the resurrection
Forth from those graves may spring
Like to the glorious body
Of Christ, our Lord and King.

4 The pure in heart are blessèd,
For they shall see the Lord
Forever and forever
By Seraphim adored;
And they shall drink the pleasures,
Such as no tongue can tell,
From heaven' crystal river,
And life's eternal well.

Amen.

Source: The Hymnal and Order of Service #258

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Author: Christopher Wordsworth

Christopher Wordsworth--nephew of the great lake-poet, William Wordsworth--was born in 1807. He was educated at Winchester, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A., with high honours, in 1830; M.A. in 1833; D.D. in 1839. He was elected Fellow of his College in 1830, and public orator of the University in 1836; received Priest's Orders in 1835; head master of Harrow School in 1836; Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1844; Hulsean Lecturer at Cambridge in 1847-48; Vicar of Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berks, in 1850; Archdeacon of Westminster, in 1865; Bishop of Lincoln, in 1868. His writings are numerous, and some of them very valuable. Most of his works are in prose. His "Holy Year; or, Hymns for Sundays, Holidays, and other occ… Go to person page >

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First Line:	O Lord, our strength in weakness
Author:	Christopher Wordsworth (1881)
Meter:	7.6.7.6 D
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

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Notes

O Lord, our Strength in weakness. Bishop C. Wordsworth of Lincoln. [For a Girls' Friendly Society.] Written in 1881 for The Lincoln Diocesan Manual of the Girls' Friendly Society, and first printed therein, 1881, in 6 stanzas of 8 lines (Lincoln: Williamson). It is an admirable lyric on Temperance, and is one of the most beautiful of Bishop Wordsworth's hymns.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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Tune

LANCASHIRE (Smart)

Henry T. Smart (PHH 233) composed the tune in 1835 for use at a missions festival at Blackburn, Lancashire, England. For that festival, which celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in England, the tune was set to Reginald Heber's (PHH 249) “From Greenland's Icy Mountains.”…

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GOSTERWOOD

NEED (34332)

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