In April of 2008 I attended the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville, KY. It was an amazing experience. The messages from God's Word were powerful and the music was tremendous and was perfectly matched to the messages. One of the songs we sang was entitled "How Sweet and Awful Is This Place" written by Isaac Watts. This hymn is amazing because it combines both the sweetness that comes with being in a holy God's presence with the overwhelming sense of awe and fear as we consider our sin placed against the backdrop of God's holiness, mercy, and grace and as we consider just exactly what we have been saved from. I love the song because I think it gives us a glimpse of what it will be like to stand in God's presence one day. We will be singing this song Sunday evening as we observe the Lord's Supper as a body. Below are the lyrics.
How Sweet and Awful Is this Place
Words by Isaac Watts
How sweet and awful is the place
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores.
While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
"Lord, why was I a guest?"
"Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there's room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?"
'Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly drew us in;
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.
Pity the nations, O our God,
Constrain the earth to come;
Send Thy victorious Word abroad,
And bring the strangers home.
We long to see Thy churches full,
That all the chosen race
May, with one voice and heart and soul,
Sing Thy redeeming grace.
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