122. Rejoice, the Lord Is King

The Story Behind the Hymn

Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1746, building it directly around Philippians 4:4 — 'Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice' — and around the broader New Testament theme of Christ's ascension and present heavenly reign, a somewhat less commonly sung hymn theme compared to the nativity and crucifixion hymns that dominate much of the wider Christian hymn tradition, including a considerable portion of the hymns found elsewhere throughout this collection.

Wesley wrote the hymn during a particularly demanding and physically exhausting period of his own itinerant preaching career, traveling almost constantly across England on horseback to preach at open-air Methodist meetings, often to hostile crowds, in a pattern of ministry that left him and his brother John chronically fatigued and occasionally in real physical danger from opposition, much as described elsewhere in this collection regarding 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul' (hymn 26).

Against that backdrop of genuine physical hardship and uncertainty, the hymn's insistent, twice-repeated command to 'rejoice' — doubled again in its own chorus, 'rejoice, again I say, rejoice' — reads less as an easy, circumstance-dependent celebration and more as a deliberate act of will, a choice to celebrate Christ's secure heavenly reign specifically because present earthly circumstances offered so little immediate cause for celebration on their own.

John Darwall, an English clergyman and amateur composer, wrote the tune most commonly associated with the hymn today in 1770, more than two decades after Wesley's original text, and the hymn has remained a standard piece of Ascension Day worship across English-speaking Protestant churches, marking the specific biblical event of Christ's return to heaven forty days after His resurrection that the hymn's own confident, present-tense language of Christ's ongoing reign directly describes.