How sweet and awesome is the place with Christ within the doors,
while everlasting love displays the choicest of her stores.
While all our hearts and all our songs join to admire the feast,
each of us cries, with thankful tongue, “Lord, why was I a guest?
“Why was I made to hear your voice, and enter while there’s room,
when thousands make a wretched choice, and rather starve than come?”
‘Twas the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in;
else we had still refused to taste, and perished in our sin.
Pity the nations, O our God, constrain the earth to come;
send your victorious Word abroad, and bring the strangers home.
We long to see your churches full, that all the chosen race
may, with one voice and heart and soul, sing your redeeming grace.
— Isaac Watts (1674 – 1748)
