Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation!
All ye who hear, now to His temple draw near;
Join me in glad adoration.
Praise to the Lord, who o'er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires e'er have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?
Praise to the Lord, who will prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.
Public domain hymn text (published 1680 / 1863 (trans.)). Words by Joachim Neander (trans. Catherine Winkworth).
The Story Behind the Hymn
Joachim Neander was one of the earliest and most theologically significant hymn writers to emerge from the German Reformed tradition, working first as a schoolteacher and later as an assistant pastor in Dusseldorf during the final decades of the seventeenth century, a period of considerable doctrinal tension between the German Reformed and Lutheran churches during which Neander's own strict theological convictions repeatedly put him at odds with local church authorities. He wrote both the words and the original tune of this hymn himself, basing its text closely on Psalm 103's sweeping call to 'bless the Lord' and to actively remember and recount all of His specific benefits, rather than praising Him only in vague or general terms.
Neander was known among his contemporaries for retreating frequently, sometimes for entire days at a time, to a scenic limestone gorge along the Dussel River just outside the city, where he would pray, meditate, and compose hymns in solitude away from the pressures of his official pastoral duties and the ongoing doctrinal disputes that surrounded him. The gorge became so closely and permanently associated with him in local memory that it was formally renamed the 'Neander Valley' — Neanderthal in German — in his honor not long after his death.
In one of history's stranger and more unexpected coincidences, that same valley later gave its name, nearly two full centuries after Neander's death, to the prehistoric human remains discovered there in 1856, meaning the German word most commonly associated worldwide today with early human evolution actually derives, at one remove, from a seventeenth-century Reformed hymn writer who had simply enjoyed praying quietly in that particular gorge.
Neander died of tuberculosis at only thirty years old, in 1680, not long after writing some of his best-known hymn texts, including this one, cutting short what might otherwise have been an even more substantial body of hymnic work. The hymn nonetheless remains, to this day, one of the most widely translated and sung German hymns anywhere in the English-speaking Protestant world, a status owed in considerable part to a particularly well-regarded English translation completed by Catherine Winkworth nearly two centuries later, in the 1860s, as part of her broader lifelong project of introducing major German hymn texts to English-language congregations who would otherwise never have encountered them.
