Lyrics
Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,
Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt,
Yonder on Calvary's mount out-poured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilt.
Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that is greater than all our sin.
Sin and despair like the sea waves cold,
Threaten the soul with infinite loss,
Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold,
Points to the refuge, the mighty cross.
Dark is the stain that we cannot hide,
What can avail to wash it away?
Look! There is flowing a crimson tide;
Whiter than snow you may be today.
Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace,
Freely bestowed on all who believe;
All who are longing to see His face,
Will you this moment His grace receive?
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1911), a meditation on Romans 5:20.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Julia H. Johnston wrote "Grace Greater Than Our Sin" around 1910, and it was published in 1911 in the collection Hymns Tried and True. Daniel B. Towner, who composed the tune, named it MOODY in honor of his position as director of music at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where he trained generations of gospel singers and songwriters.
Johnston, born in 1849 in Salineville, Ohio, to a minister father and a poet mother, began writing as a child and went on to author books on Christian missions alongside hundreds of hymn texts. She spent forty-one years as a Sunday school superintendent and teacher in Peoria, Illinois — a role that likely shaped the plain, teachable clarity of this hymn's central image.
The hymn is built directly on Romans 5:20 — "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound" — and each stanza works through a different picture of that abundance: grace outpoured at Calvary, grace as a refuge against the cold sea waves of despair, grace as a crimson tide capable of washing out a stain nothing else can touch. The refrain compresses the whole argument into four short lines, repeating the single word "grace" until it becomes less a concept than a plain declaration.
More than a century after its first publication, "Grace Greater Than Our Sin" remains one of the clearest congregational statements of the idea at its center — not that sin is minimized, but that grace is simply larger than it, in every direction the hymn can find to say so.
