Lyrics
I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene,
And wonder how He could love me,
A sinner, condemned, unclean.
O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be:
O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
Is my Savior's love for me!
For me it was in the garden
He prayed: Not My will, but Thine.
He had no tears for His own griefs,
But sweat drops of blood for mine.
In pity angels beheld Him,
And came from the world of light
To comfort Him in the sorrows
He bore for my soul that night.
He took my sins and my sorrows,
He made them His very own;
He bore the burden to Calvary,
And suffered and died alone.
When with the ransomed in glory
His face I at last shall see,
'Twill be my joy through the ages
To sing of His love for me.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1905), also known as My Savior's Love.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles H. Gabriel wrote both the words and music of "I Stand Amazed in the Presence," also known by its refrain-derived title "My Savior's Love," publishing it in 1905 in E. O. Excell's collection Praises. The same year, the hymn also appeared in two other collections, Songs of Praise Number Two and Revival Hymns, an unusually fast and wide simultaneous circulation for a new gospel song.
Gabriel later gave a brief account of the hymn's origin in his 1918 Personal Memoirs. Elijah P. Brown, founder of a publication called The Ram's Horn, sent Gabriel two lines he had written: "He had no tears for his own griefs, but sweat drops of blood for mine," suggesting they might work as the seed of a song. Gabriel took the image of Gethsemane in those two lines and built the rest of the hymn around it, with the original four stanzas expanded to five by 1910.
The hymn moves in a single sustained motion from Gethsemane to Calvary to glory: the prayer in the garden, the angels who came to comfort Christ in His sorrow, the burden borne alone to the cross, and finally the promise of seeing His face among the ransomed. Each stanza closes on the same disbelief that opens the hymn — wonder that this love was for me specifically, not humanity in the abstract.
Gabriel became, by the account of his contemporaries, the most popular gospel-song writer of the early twentieth century, credited with thousands of songs and dozens of collections. Of that enormous output, "I Stand Amazed" remains among the most widely sung more than a century later.
