Lyrics
When upon life's billows you are tempest-tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,
And you will be singing as the days go by.
When you look at others with their lands and gold,
Think that Christ has promised you His wealth untold;
Count your many blessings, money cannot buy
Your reward in heaven, nor your home on high.
So, amid the conflict, whether great or small,
Do not be discouraged, God is over all;
Count your many blessings, angels will attend,
Help and comfort give you to your journey’s end.
Public domain hymn text (published 1897). Words by Johnson Oatman Jr..
The Story Behind the Hymn
Johnson Oatman Jr., the prolific New Jersey lay preacher and businessman already discussed elsewhere in this collection as author of ‘Higher Ground’, wrote this particular hymn’s text in 1897.
He wrote it once again while continuing to maintain his full-time secular career in the insurance business, treating his considerable hymn-writing output, as he did throughout his entire life, primarily as an evening and weekend devotional practice conducted alongside rather than instead of his primary vocation.
Edwin Excell, a highly successful gospel-song composer, music publisher, and traveling song leader, composed the specific tune paired with Oatman’s text. He worked directly and extensively with several major evangelists of the era, including Sam Jones and Gipsy Smith.
The resulting combination of Oatman’s characteristically simple, direct, practically oriented text with Excell’s brisk, immediately singable melody together made the hymn one of the single most widely reprinted individual gospel songs found in American hymnals for many decades afterward, appearing regularly in hymnal collections well into the twentieth century.
The hymn’s central governing instruction is to deliberately and actively ‘count’ one’s specific blessings, by literally naming them out loud, one by one in sequence — rather than simply cultivating a vague, generalized feeling of gratitude without ever specifying its actual concrete content.
That reflects the practical, almost directly instructional style that was genuinely typical of Oatman’s hymn writing generally, across his enormous total output.
Rather than working carefully through elevated, systematic theological argument, in the manner of hymn writers like Isaac Watts, Oatman’s hymns as a body of work consistently tended instead to offer concrete, immediately actionable spiritual advice. Ordinary rank-and-file churchgoers, regardless of their level of formal theological education, could apply that advice directly and practically to their own daily circumstances.
This hymn’s specific, itemized instruction to physically count and name blessings one by one represents perhaps the clearest and most practically minded example found anywhere within his entire five-thousand-hymn body of work.
