Sing praise to God who reigns above,
The God of all creation,
The God of power, the God of love,
The God of our salvation;
With healing balm my soul He fills,
And every faithless murmur stills:
To God all praise and glory!
What God's almighty power has made
Is ever in His keeping;
By morning glow or evening shade
His watchful eye unsleeping;
Within the kingdom of His might
His wisdom governs all aright—
To God all praise and glory!
We sought the Lord in our distress;
O God, in mercy hear us.
Our Savior saw our helplessness
And came with peace to cheer us.
For this we thank and praise the Lord,
Who is by one and all adored:
To God all praise and glory!
The Lord is never far away,
But through all grief distressing,
An ever-present help and stay,
Our peace and joy and blessing.
As with a mother's tender hand
He leads His own, His chosen band:
To God all praise and glory!
Thus all my toilsome way along
I sing aloud His praises,
That all may hear the grateful song
My voice unwearied raises.
Be joyful in the Lord, my heart;
Both soul and body bear your part:
To God all praise and glory!
Public domain hymn text. Original German words by Johann J. Schütz, 1675; English translation by Catherine Winkworth.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Johann Jakob Schütz was born in 1640 in Frankfurt, Germany, and unlike most hymn writers of his era he was not a clergyman but a practicing lawyer. He moved in the same reforming circles as Philipp Jakob Spener, the Lutheran pastor whose 1675 book “Pia Desideria” is generally regarded as the founding document of Pietism, a movement that pushed back against what its adherents saw as a Lutheran church grown too focused on doctrinal correctness and too little concerned with heartfelt, lived faith. Schütz wrote this hymn the very same year Spener's book appeared, and its confident, personal tone — praising God's care not abstractly but as something felt directly, “within my soul” — reflects that same Pietist emphasis on devotion as something experienced rather than merely believed.
The hymn remained within German-speaking Lutheran and Pietist circles for close to two centuries before reaching English-speaking congregations, carried across that gap by one of the nineteenth century's most important hymn translators, Catherine Winkworth. Born in England in 1827, Winkworth became fluent in German during time spent in Dresden and devoted much of her adult life to translating German hymnody into English verse that could actually be sung, not merely read — a much harder task than plain translation, since it required matching meter and rhyme while preserving the original meaning.
Winkworth published this translation in her 1858 collection “Lyra Germanica,” a volume that introduced English and American congregations to a wealth of German Lutheran and Pietist hymnody they would otherwise never have encountered, since few English-speaking worshippers of the era read German. The collection proved enormously influential, and several of her translations, including this one, became permanent fixtures of English-language hymnals.
Winkworth was also an active advocate for women's education in England, working to expand educational opportunities for women and girls alongside her literary and translation work — a reminder that many of the era's most significant hymn translators were engaged in public work well beyond the hymnal.
The hymn is commonly sung to a tune drawn from the 1566 hymnal of the Bohemian Brethren, an even older source than Schütz's own text, giving the finished hymn as sung today a layered history spanning more than three centuries and three distinct European Protestant traditions before it ever reached an English-speaking congregation.
