Lyrics
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;
‘Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary, rest.
Dear name! the rock on which I build,
My shield and hiding place,
My never-failing treasury, filled
With boundless stores of grace.
How weak the effort of my heart,
How cold my warmest thought;
But when I see Thee as Thou art,
I’ll praise Thee as I ought.
Till then I would Thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath;
And may the music of Thy name
Refresh my soul in death.
Public domain hymn text (1779). Words by John Newton.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Newton wrote this hymn’s text for the 1779 ‘Olney Hymns’ collection — the same joint hymnal project with William Cowper that also produced ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’.
The hymn’s original text ran to a considerably longer six stanzas, than the two or three typically printed in modern hymnals. Each additional verse worked through a different specific benefit — comfort, healing, guidance, provision — that Newton associated with the simple act of speaking or hearing Christ’s own name.
Newton had a well-documented earlier life as a slave-ship captain — a career he later described with genuine horror and repentance in his own writing. Given that history, the hymn’s specific claim that Christ’s name ‘soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear’ carries a particular weight when read against Newton’s own biography.
He was a man whose actual working life for years had inflicted exactly this kind of wound and sorrow on others, before his own dramatic conversion redirected the whole of his life’s remaining work.
The hymn compares Christ’s name to ‘manna’ — the miraculous bread God provided the Israelites during their wilderness wandering, in Exodus 16. That reinforces a recurring theme found throughout much of Newton’s writing more broadly.
It is the image of the Christian life as an ongoing journey through difficulty, sustained not by any store of resources the believer has accumulated in advance, but by daily, freshly given provision from God — much as the Israelites could not stockpile manna but had to gather it fresh each morning.
The hymn remains one of the most widely reprinted individual hymn texts of the entire eighteenth century.
Its simple, direct celebration of the sound and meaning of Christ’s own name has been translated into dozens of languages, and sung across virtually every Christian denominational tradition, in the more than two centuries since Newton first included it among his contributions to the Olney Hymns.
