Would you be free from the burden of sin?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Would you o’er evil a victory win?
There’s wonderful power in the blood.
There is power, power, wonder-working power
In the blood of the Lamb;
There is power, power, wonder-working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb.
Would you be free from your passion and pride?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Come for a cleansing to Calvary’s tide,
There’s wonderful power in the blood.
Would you be whiter, much whiter than snow?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Sin-stains are lost in its life-giving flow,
There’s wonderful power in the blood.
Public domain hymn text (1899). Words by Lewis E. Jones.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Lewis E. Jones was an American gospel song writer who wrote both the words and music of this hymn in 1899, working within the broader gospel-song tradition that had, by the close of the nineteenth century, produced a substantial and well-established body of hymns built around the specific image of Christ's atoning blood, including several other hymns represented elsewhere in this collection such as 'There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood' (hymn 42) and 'Are You Washed in the Blood' (hymn 44).
Jones structured the hymn as a series of direct rhetorical questions — would you be free from sin's burden, from pride, from stained conscience — each answered with the same repeated affirmation that the specific solution lies in 'the blood,' a repetitive question-and-answer structure designed for easy congregational participation and memorization even by singers encountering the hymn for the first time.
The hymn's third verse directly echoes the language and imagery of 'Whiter Than Snow' (hymn 56 elsewhere in this collection), drawing on the same Psalm 51:7 image of moral cleansing already used by James Nicholson decades earlier, illustrating how certain core biblical images — blood as cleansing agent, snow as the resulting whiteness — were reused and recombined repeatedly across many different gospel songs by many different writers throughout this general period rather than remaining tied to any single hymn or author.
The hymn's driving, insistent chorus, built around the triple repetition of the word 'power,' gave it a particularly forceful, rhythmic quality well suited to enthusiastic congregational singing at revival meetings, and it remains, more than a century after Jones first wrote it, one of the most widely recognized individual hymns specifically associated with the broader 'blood of the Lamb' theme running throughout much of the gospel-song tradition of this era.
