Day 94: Nothing But The Blood... The Story Behind It...

I love finding out how things come to be, especially why people write, what they write. This is such a beautiful song and lovely for this week. I also decided to share this due to a post I read on a friends blog that made me rather sad... more on that later.

Almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission. ~Hebrews 9:22

As we thumb through our Bibles, we run across beloved and deeply underlined verses like these:
And when I see the blood, I will pass over you... It is the blood that makes atonement for the soul... For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins... The church of God which He purchased with His own blood... Christ Jesus whom God set forth as propitiation by His blood... In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace... With His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption... The precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb... The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.*

We shouldn't be surprised, then , as we study the great hymnists of history, to find their should thrilled and their songs filled with this them.

In 1739, Count Zinzendorf wrote his great "Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness." That same year, Charles Wesley penned, "His blood can make the foulest clean, / His blood availed for me."

The melancholy William Cowper wrote, "There is a fountain filled with blood / drawn from Emmanuel's veins / And sinners plunged beneath that flood / Lose all their guilty stains."

Perhaps the most popular hymn about the blood is this one, written by two men who came to Christ as teenagers. Robert Lowry, author of the words, came to Christ at age seventeen. William Doane confessed Christ as his Savior while in high school. Together they wrote hymns and published gospel songbooks.

When "Nothing but the Blood" was published in 1876, the attached Scripture was from Hebrews 9:22: "Without shedding of blood there is no remission." Most of our hymnals omit Lowry's original final two stanzas:

Now by this I'll overcome / Nothing but the blood of Jesus,

Now by this I'll reach my home / Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Glory! Glory! This I sing / Nothing but the blood of Jesus,

All my praise for this I bring / Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Copyrighted to Robert J. Morgan, Then Sings My Soul(Special Edition)

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