Lyrics
Soldiers of Christ, arise,
And put your armor on,
Strong in the strength which God supplies
Through His eternal Son;
Strong in the Lord of hosts
And in His mighty power,
Who in the strength of Jesus trusts
Is more than conqueror.
Stand then in His great might,
With all His strength endued,
And take, to arm you for the fight,
The panoply of God.
From strength to strength go on,
Wrestle and fight and pray;
Tread all the powers of darkness down
And win the well-fought day.
Leave no unguarded place,
No weakness of the soul;
Take every virtue, every grace,
And fortify the whole.
That, having all things done
And all your conflicts past,
Ye may o'ercome through Christ alone
And stand entire at last.
Public domain hymn text (written 1749, from a longer original poem). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote the poem that became "Soldiers of Christ, Arise" in 1747, originally titling it "The Whole Armour of God" and drawing directly on Paul's description of spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6:10-18. Its earliest form ran to sixteen stanzas of eight lines each — far too long for ordinary congregational use — and was published under its now-familiar title in 1749 in Wesley's collection Hymns and Sacred Poems.
The full poem was written during a period of open hostility toward the early Methodist movement in Britain, and its martial language — soldiers, armor, conquerors, the well-fought day — carried real weight for a movement that saw itself as facing genuine opposition. It came to be nicknamed "the Christian's bugle blast" for the way its military imagery, especially once set to music, functioned almost as a rallying call.
Wesley's brother John later included a substantially shortened twelve-stanza version in his 1780 hymnal for Methodist congregations, and by 1847 the hymn had been further trimmed to the three-stanza version most commonly sung today — the cumulative result of nearly a century of editors selecting which parts of Wesley's much longer original best stood on their own.
What survives in that three-verse form retains the essential structure of the original: a call to arm, a call to advance, and a call to guard every weak place in the soul — the whole of Ephesians 6 compressed from Wesley's sixteen stanzas down to the handful most congregations still know by heart.
