16. O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing

The Story Behind the Hymn

Charles Wesley was the younger brother of Methodist movement founder John Wesley. He became one of the most prolific hymn writers in the entire history of Christianity, credited over his lifetime with more than six thousand individual hymn texts.

That output was so vast that a significant portion remains in print and in active congregational use nearly three centuries after his death, while much of it has never been set to music or sung at all.

He wrote this particular hymn to mark the first anniversary of his own dramatic conversion experience. That conversion had occurred on May 21, 1738, at a small religious meeting in London, where Charles described feeling a sudden, overwhelming assurance of God’s forgiveness, after a long period of spiritual searching and personal doubt.

The experience closely paralleled his brother John’s own famous ‘heart strangely warmed’ conversion, just three days later, at a separate meeting on Aldersgate Street — an event now considered one of the founding moments of the entire Methodist movement.

The hymn’s famous opening line, wishing for ‘a thousand tongues’ to sing God’s praise, was directly inspired by a conversation Charles had shortly after his conversion, with Peter Böhler, a German Moravian church leader. Böhler’s calm, settled confidence in his own faith had deeply influenced both Wesley brothers, during a formative period when they were still working through unresolved spiritual uncertainty of their own.

Böhler reportedly told Charles that if he personally possessed a thousand tongues, he would use every single one of them to praise Christ. That offhand remark, Wesley later transformed into the hymn’s now-famous opening plea for exactly that same multiplied capacity to give praise.

The hymn was originally composed with eighteen stanzas, of which only a small handful of verses are typically sung in modern hymnals. The full text was placed deliberately first in Wesley’s own published hymn collections, for decades afterward.

It functioned almost as a personal manifesto, or founding statement, for the enormous life’s work of hymn writing and itinerant evangelism that followed his conversion. That meant the very first hymn a reader encountered, upon opening a Wesleyan hymnbook, was, quite intentionally, the story of how its author’s entire hymn-writing career had begun in the first place.