Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you walking daily by the Savior's side?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Do you rest each moment in the Crucified?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be white,
Pure and white in the blood of the Lamb?
Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!
Public domain hymn text (published 1878). Words by Elisha A. Hoffman.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Elisha Hoffman was an American minister affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Protestant denomination founded in the late nineteenth century with a particularly strong emphasis on personal holiness, practical Christian discipleship, and active global missionary work, and over the full course of his working life he became one of the single most prolific gospel hymn writers of his entire era, ultimately credited with more than two thousand individual hymn texts across a career that spanned several decades of active ministry.
Alongside his considerable hymn-writing output, Hoffman also served for many years as a working parish pastor in Illinois, frequently laboring directly among the rural and working-class poor of his congregation and community, and a great many of his hymns — including this one and his even better-known later hymn 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms' (hymn 72 in this collection) — clearly reflect that same sustained pastoral concern with practical, applied, day-to-day Christian holiness rather than with abstract or purely academic theological argument, an orientation consistent with his denomination's broader emphasis on lived discipleship.
This hymn's central governing image, being 'washed in the blood of the Lamb,' draws directly on sacrificial imagery running throughout both the Old Testament system of animal sacrifice and atonement described in books like Leviticus, and the later New Testament book of Revelation, which repeatedly describes redeemed believers as having washed their robes and made them white specifically 'in the blood of the Lamb.' This hymn became one of a great many gospel songs composed during this same general era that were built around this identical vivid, visceral, cleansing metaphor for forgiveness and genuine inward moral transformation, a metaphor that proved especially popular and durable within the revivalist and holiness-movement hymnody of Hoffman's own particular theological tradition.
The hymn's repeated, direct, second-person questioning refrain — 'are you washed in the blood, in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?' — reflects a broader stylistic pattern common across much of Hoffman's larger body of hymn writing: a preference for hymns that actively confronted and questioned the individual singer directly, demanding some kind of personal, immediate self-examination in response, rather than allowing worshippers to sing entirely comfortable, purely descriptive theological statements about God without any accompanying call to personal reflection or response.
