Isaac Watts lived about three hundred years ago in England and has been called the “Godfather of English Hymnody”. He did not earn that title for writing the most songs ever. Though Watts wrote a respectable 750 hymns, a younger contemporary in England, Charles Wesley, is said to have penned more than 6,500 hymns, and a century later in America, Fannie Crosby wrote over 8,000. But Watts blazed the trail by skillfully paraphrasing many Bible verses into doctrinally sound, singable lyrics. “Love God With All Your Soul (and Strength)” is a lovely, compact sample of his work. It has been published using several different melodies. I picked my favorite of those melodies for this recording. His song originally had only the first verse, but somewhere along the way it picked up the second verse, which extends the song to almost — wait for it — a whole minute long. Please give it a sing-along listen, then let’s talk about Watts, song writing and the power a few brief words can pack.
Bible paraphrase songs
Isaac Watts had a knack for writing songs that paraphrased Bible verses, keeping the verse’s message while making it singable. And what great verses he paraphrased for this little song! Jesus had highlighted them himself. Matthew 22 records the incident:
[A Pharisee asked Jesus]
“Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?” Jesus declared, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
[Matthew 22:36-40 BSB]
To form that answer to the Pharisee, it seems Jesus may have been drawing from Deuteronomy and Leviticus:
And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. [Deuteronomy 6:5 BSB]
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.
[Leviticus 19:18 BSB]
THEN Jesus promoted this message further by declaring “all the law and Prophets hang on these…”. Jesus made it clear that this is a great message. BINGO. We can just imagine Watt’s yelling, “Let’s sing it!”
To that end, Isaac Watts paraphrased this top-of-the-line great message, and then made the simple lyrics we just sang in this song.
(As I understand it, later on someone else paraphrased “the Golden Rule” — In everything, then, do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is the essence of the Law and the Prophets. [Matthew 7:12 BSB] — and made the lyrics for the second verse.)
With lyrics done, Watts added a popular melody of his day, and voila! He (and whoever did that second verse) gave us a short and lovely song that has helped many folks learn both “the essence of the Law and the Prophets” AND “what all the Law and the Prophets hang on”.
What an amazing amount of useful truth to pack into such a brief song!
Message, prose & prosody
Watts is a wonderful example of a Biblical songwriter. Let’s see if we, too, can write a song that declares Bible truth.
A good Bible song lyric can be built based on a favorite Bible verse. Here is the challenge — exact quotes from the Bible might not be easy to sing. The good news is their message can be paraphrased and reshaped into song lyrics.
Have you heard the record in Nehemiah 8 of Ezra and his gang reading the scriptures and then giving the listeners the sense of them? (“They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading [ESV]) This is that kind of project. And … remember it’s always good to check in with the Lord regularly when doing this kind of paraphrasing work.
Let’s start by finding a Bible verse — a Bible message — to turn into a song. How about this? — 1 John 1:5 says: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”. We might draw on those exact words for lyrics. And we might paraphrase. For example, based on this verse, we are probably safe to say in a song: “God is good, and in him is no badness at all”.
Maybe you’ve heard a person say “God is good, all the time”, and others respond, “all the time, God is good”. I am not aware of any Bible version that has these exact call-and-response words, but the message — the idea — can be supported by Bible verses. It’s a paraphrase of Bible truth.
We can start with those Bible ideas to form a song message. Our next step will be to write — to “paraphrase” — the song message as simple prose — “in plain words”. Then we’ll organize the plain message words into a song-shaped outline which uses section titles like “Verse 1”, “Verse 2”, “Chorus”, etc. (We do this outline work to decide where each part of the song’s message will show up in our song.)
Let’s look at Isaac Watts’ song to get a picture of these song-writing ideas. Here is a “song-shaped” outline of “Love God With All Your Soul” —
Verse 1:
The greatest commandment in the law (Matthew 22:36-40)
Verse 2:
The Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12)
We can see from his finished lyrics that he included much, but not all of the Bible information contained in the source verses.
— Notice his song lyrics do not mention Pharisees.
— Notice Watts saw fit to add a Bible idea from elsewhere: “Be faithful, just, and kind”.
Why would he do these things? It is likely those decisions added flexibility he needed to craft a Bible song lyric that would tell the message clearly, musically and with the right emphasis. I think most would agree he succeeded.
Let’s play with those Bible message ideas we were looking at moments ago — and see if we can craft a new song using them. First we’ll write out the source material for the message, and then we can paraphrase the message details into simple prose. We’ll need a song outline form. Let’s borrow the format Watts used — two verses.
Here is our plan for where the source content can show up in our new song —
Verse 1:
“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”
Verse 2:
“God is good, all the time – all the time, God is good”
That’s what we want the song to say. Now we’ll figure out a “lyrical” way to say it. Let’s start paraphrasing. We will sift through the message ideas and put those thoughts into “our own words”. Like Watts, we might choose not to include every idea. And maybe we’ll choose to bring in another fitting Bible idea or two to fill it out.
PROSE (this is a paraphrase of the source content set in simple words):
Verse 1:
I heard, and now tell you: God is light, no darkness in Him
Verse 2:
(I heard, and now tell you:) God is good all the time.
There. We know — in simple prose — what each verse will communicate.
(Also, we included an idea to repeat in the second verse the words from the first verse: “I heard and now tell you”, even though the source info “God is good always …” doesn’t mention anything about “I heard, I tell …”
Why? It just seems like a good song idea to borrow that from the first verse. It seems to fit there, it feels musical, and, after all, songs love repetition. So, we’ll jot it in there while we are thinking of it so we’ll remember to try it out.)
Now we do the work to carve and reshape this prose message into a singable lyric. Here we deal with prosody. Prosody is working with word rhythms, sounds, pitch, stress patterns, etc. Let’s discover a way to make those prose ideas sound musical. This can go quickly or it can take a lot of time. Let’s roll up our sleeves and start crafting. Remember, getting there is most of the fun!
It will help us if we will add structure to guide our task. We’ll select a verse shape and size to “pour” our lyrics into. How about this form —
— four lines to a verse with eight syllables to a line (this is called “song meter 8888”)
— make lines two and four rhyme
After some writing and erasing and moving things around, here is an idea that makes lyrics out of the prose —
PROSODY (adding rhythm and rhyme to the message):
Verse 1:
This is the word that I have heard
I’ll share it with you; know it’s right
We’ll find no badness in our God
No darkness in Him, He is light.
Verse 2:
This is the word that I have heard
I’ll say it loud, like bells that chime
Our God is good, so very good.
Our God is good, good all the time
HAH!
Now for a MELODY. We might find an “old” melody that fits this “meter” or make up a new one. I searched a song site called “Hymnary.org” for tunes using the 8888 meter and picked one from a long list of choices. I used music notation software called MuseScore to “desktop publish” our new song. Here it is:
If you want to hear the melody,
visit “Lord Speak To Me That I May Speak”.
This same Shumann tune has been used before!
Summary:
1. Get a good message
2. Make an outline of the paraphrased message and organize it into the form you want for this song — into the shape of verses and chorus, etc.
3. Apply prosody to this prose, forming rhythmic rhymes.
(TIPS – Check out a great free resource https://www.rhymezone.com for help. Use their “synonym” tool to look for other words that mean the same as the words in your “message”, but might have better rhyming possibilities. Then look at their “rhyme” tool to help you form new lines to rhyme. Compose on paper so you don’t overwrite good ideas that might fit elsewhere.)
4. Find an old melody or make a new one.
You can see we do not need a lightning bolt of inspiration to strike us in order to make up a new song. It is possible to sit and write stuff simply by deciding to. Just know every song we write won’t be a top 40 hit. (I know, right?!?)
This is a bare bones start, but I trust there’s enough here to get you moving in a good direction. I hope you’ll get the writing bug and will try this yourself at home.
One-verse powerhouses
One more thought on this Isaac Watts song, and others like it. It almost seems silly — maybe even disrespectful — to take a verse the Lord Jesus Christ made so huge (“All the Law and the Prophets hang on” it) and set it in a “kids'” (?!?) song that doesn’t even last one minute.
But — but — every great lesson cannot be only those long ones that require thirty-three hours — or even thirty-three minutes — to present. Every song cannot be the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Even a small song can be powerful. Some of the best, most vital things we’ll ever learn can be said in one sentence, especially if it comes from God.
I’ll make this even smaller. Sometimes one word can make the difference between life and tragedy. Years ago our then tiny son, Jonathan, and I were playing in the front yard. He failed to respond to a verbal instruction I had just given, so we stopped everything and did a “game drill” for a quick minute. “Jonathan. Come here. Stop. Come here. Stop. Come here. Stop.” It was serious, but not ugly, and we had fun, but got “the right response, first time” tuned up. About a day later we were crossing a street when a car appeared from nowhere, whipping around the corner fast, heading for the position Jonathan was bolting toward. He heard Dad say “STOP!!”
And. He. Did.
The car whooshed by. So close.
It is still a hard story to tell.
Sometimes one verse … or even one word … is exactly what will save. Never disparage short, simple truth. What might you have missed, where might you be, if you had lived your entire life and no one ever shared — you never heard — these few, vital words “Love God with all your soul”?
God bless you lots
-Dale R.
LYRICS: Love God With All Your Soul And Strength
Text: Isaac Watts (1715)
Tune: Old English Melody
1. Love God with all your soul and strength.
With all your heart and mind;
And love your neighbor as yourself:
Be faithful, just, and kind.
2. Deal with another as you’d have
Another deal with you:
What you’re unwilling to receive,
Be sure you never do.
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