Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it!
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed through His infinite mercy,
His child, and forever, I am.
Redeemed, redeemed,
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed, redeemed,
His child, and forever, I am.
Redeemed, and so happy in Jesus,
No language my rapture can tell;
I know that the light of His presence
With me doth continually dwell.
I think of my blessed Redeemer,
I think of Him all the day long:
I sing, for I cannot be silent;
His love is the theme of my song.
I know I shall see in His beauty
The King in whose law I delight;
Who lovingly guardeth my footsteps,
And giveth me songs in the night.
Public domain hymn text (published 1882). Words by Fanny Crosby.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Fanny Crosby, blind since infancy and already responsible elsewhere in this collection for the words to several other widely sung hymns including 'Blessed Assurance' (hymn 6) and 'Whiter Than Snow' (hymn 56), wrote this particular hymn's text in 1882 to an already-existing tune previously composed by William J. Kirkpatrick, continuing throughout this collaboration her characteristic decades-long working method of reliably supplying finished, polished lyrics to fit already-completed melodies handed to her directly by publishers and composers, rather than working the reverse way around.
The hymn is particularly notable among Crosby's genuinely vast overall body of work for how directly, repeatedly, and insistently it makes deliberate use throughout its text of the specific word 'redeemed' — originally a precise legal and financial term within its own ancient biblical context, describing quite literally the formal act of buying back something, or someone, that had previously been sold away or otherwise lost — Crosby deliberately applying that same precise, almost technical legal and financial language directly to her own deeply personal sense of having herself been individually purchased back from spiritual bondage specifically through Christ's own sacrificial death.
Crosby frequently stated, in numerous interviews and later personal writings across her long life, that she genuinely considered her own lifelong blindness to be a distinct personal blessing rather than any kind of tragedy or misfortune, believing firmly that it had actually spared her from a great deal of ordinary worldly visual distraction and had thereby allowed her to focus far more fully and consistently on purely spiritual matters throughout her working life — an outlook of genuinely untroubled, entirely unclouded personal joy that runs clearly and consistently through this particular hymn's confident, celebratory overall tone from its very opening line onward, without any trace of the bitterness or resentment some might reasonably have expected from a writer who had never once, in her entire long life, been able to see anything at all with her own physical eyes.
