Lyrics
Jesu, Thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress:
'Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.
Bold shall I stand in Thy great day;
For who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully through these absolved I am
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame.
The holy, the unspotted Lamb,
Who from the Father's bosom came,
Who died, for me, e'en me, t'atone,
Now for my Lord and God I own.
Lord, I believe the precious blood
Which at the mercy-seat of God
For ever doth for sinners plead,
For me, e'en for my soul, was shed.
Lord, I believe, were sinners more
Than sands upon the ocean-shore,
For all Thou hast the ransom giv'n,
Purchased for all peace, life, and Heav'n.
Lord, I believe the price is paid,
For every soul th'atonement made;
And every soul Thy grace may prove,
Loved with an everlasting love.
Jesu, be endless praise to Thee,
Whose boundless mercy hath for me,
For me, and all Thy hands have made,
An everlasting ransom paid.
Public domain hymn text (German, 1739; English translation 1740), based on Romans 3:24. Presented here in a shortened selection of the original verses.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf wrote "Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit" in 1739 during a sea voyage from Saint Thomas in the West Indies, publishing it in an appendix to his Moravian hymnbook, Das Gesang-Buch der Gemeine in Herrn-Huth. As a boy Zinzendorf had been raised in the Pietist tradition, but his own conversion experience is traditionally traced to a specific encounter with art: seeing Ecce Homo, a painting of Christ crowned with thorns, in the Düsseldorf Gallery. That image of the suffering Christ appears to echo through this hymn's language decades later.
John Wesley translated the hymn from German into English the following year, publishing it in his 1740 Hymns and Sacred Poems. Zinzendorf's original German ran to thirty-three verses; Wesley trimmed it to twenty-four for his translation, and most hymnals since have trimmed it further still, printing only a handful of the strongest stanzas — the selection presented here follows that long-established practice of abridgment.
Wesley held Zinzendorf's hymns in high regard throughout his ministry and worked several of them into regular Methodist worship. The hymn's theology is distinctly and deliberately Reformation-flavored: Christ's blood and righteousness, not any effort of the singer's own, form the entire basis of standing before God, a point the text returns to and restates from several different angles across its many verses.
The recurring phrase "Lord, I believe" that opens several central stanzas functions almost as a confession recited in stages — belief in the atonement's reach, belief in its sufficiency for any number of sinners, belief that the price truly has been paid — each stanza adding conviction to the one before it rather than introducing a new idea.
