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Isaac Watts (1674-1748) was a native of Southampton. He was a nonconformist hymn writer. A nonconformist, in his time and place, was a dissenter from the established religion – the Church of England. He was a Congregational minister, theologian and logician.

Watts lived at a time of transition in church music. The transition was over whether to use new humanly composed hymns or stick with singing the psalms of David. Metrical psalters were introduced in England as a more Biblical form of singing than Lutheran hymns. Watts complained that Old Covenant themes were being sung by New Covenant people. Perhaps he had a point!

In Watts’s day this was a very divisive issue. Diversion from the metrical psalms was considered heretical. Watts worked to change it. In doing so tempers often flared, church members raged, and congregations split over the song service. When Watts wrote, “Join in a song with sweet accord” he was preaching to his own people because there was very little of sweet accord in singing!

In some churches a compromise was reached. Metrical psalms would be sung in the early part of the service. Humanly composed hymns were used at the end of a service at which point some people would leave or refuse to sing at all. People felt the tension between old songs and new songs like we do today!

Isaac Watts’s “new songs” (now old) were not universally accepted in his own day. The mere fact that they were humanly composed was enough to anathematize them. They were “uninspired” as opposed to the psalms of David, and were, in large measure, opposed for that reason.

Isaac Watts began writing hymns basically by accident. He once complained to his father that by singing only the psalms they were missing much New Testament truth. His father suggested that he write something better. The next Sunday he presented his first hymn: “Behold the Glories of the Lamb” when he was just a teenager. He wrote 700 hymns in his lifetime.

Something else that Watts did resulted in what we know today as congregational singing. The old style of singing was called “lining/parceling out.”  The song leader, or “clerk,” would read or sing one line of a psalm which would then be sung by the entire congregation. This was done because hymnbooks were expensive, and many worshipers did not know how to read. Watts wanted the congregation to sing one line after another, the way we do today. Watts’s method was condemned as the “new way,” but the new way prevailed.

The opening line, “Come we that love the Lord” is thought to have addressed his critics, detractors and people who refused to sing humanly devised hymns. To his muted objectors he wrote, “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God; but children of the heavenly King may speak their joys abroad.” Can you see the two camps to which Watts alluded? Those who “refuse to sing who never knew our God.” The “children of the heavenly King may speak their joys abroad.”

This hymn appeared in 1707 under the title, “Heavenly Joy on Earth.” Today, we use only four of its original ten stanzas, and in some places the wording has been changed. Robert Lowrey wrote the present tune and refrain in 1867 (some say 1869).

In my mind this hymn reflects the following passages:

“And the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).

“And the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 51:11).

“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22).