I’m sitting in a meeting in Irving this morning (as I was all day yesterday) and I remembered I failed to post yesterday.
So, I’ll drop a short post here on a song where we’ve deleted a whole phrase that completely impacts the entire song’s message…
The song is Holy, Holy, Holy.

All evidence, without having many of my sources here with me, point to the fact that the original text of this song’s last phrase was originally composed as “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” Over the years, early in the 1922 edition of Jorgenson’s Great Songs, Number One, Churches of Christ editors changed that line to read “God over all and blessed eternally.”

Why are we afraid to talk about Father, Son, and Spirit? This “aloof” concept of the Trinity in our hymns, songs and also in our worship has been absent historically…today it is coming back into the lyrics of contemporary hymns increasingly…this is a good thing too…But why have we chosen to stay content, by and large, not singing the original text of this incredibly, meaningful and world-wide popular hymn?