Becky remembered that at the Methodist church every service began with singing “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.”  She thought every church started the service with that hymn.

At Resurrection on our “Hymns of Grateful Praise Sunday” we did open with Reginald Heber’s hymn.  Heber was an Anglican priest.  He lived from 1783-1826.  After serving a country parish for 16 years, he was made Bishop of Calcutta, India.  However, after barely three years in India he died in 1826. His best known hymn was written for Trinity Sunday.

Stanza 1, ends with a declaration of the holiness of God, who is at the same time “merciful and mighty!”  This is “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”

The hymn calls us to rise in the early morning with our song rising to God.  Let our worship be a practice for the time we join the saints (St. 2) and the cherubim and seraphim around the glassy sea.

In St. 3 we confess that in this life, “the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see,” yet there is none beside God who is “Perfect in pow’r, in love and purity.”

St. 4 tells us that in the end, “All thy works shall praise Thy name, in earth and sky and sea.”

The hymn is based on Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6:2-3 and the songs in Rev. 4:2-11 and 7:9-12.  In Rev. 7:12, the angels, elders and creatures worship God saying, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God” to whom salvation belongs.