I’ve been exploring some of the very modern worship songs as an old guy 😀. But now, I’ve decided to alternate between very modern hymns, old hymns, and in-between hymns, namely the worship songs from the 60s to the 90s that feature in hymnbooks such as Mission Praise. Today it’s the turn of the in-between hymns.
Today’s song is Beautiful Saviour (All My Days), from the 1998.
As with many 1990s songs, I didn’t get to know this one until I started researching modern hymns in 2017. I created a Spotify Playlist in 2017, which I still enjoy listening to. I love to discover songs that I missed when they were first published. I do that with secular music too.
Anyway, Beautiful Saviour is one that we sang in our fellowship in Tipperary quite regularly in the last few years that I spent there. It’s an easy song to sing. I’m not sure that we would have wanted to tackle the very modern stuff. We had two hymn books, Mission Praise and Christian Hymns. Christian Hymns generally had more of the older hymns, but it did have a small selection of newer hymns, one of which was Beautiful Saviour. The writer, Stuart Townend, is one year younger than me. It’s nice to think that such a classic was written by someone younger than me. It’s a pity that I never attempted to write a hymn. Maybe I could start now. I’d need to work hard to write more than Fanny Crosby, who wrote over 8,000 or Charles Wesley, who wrote over 6.000 😀. Or, maybe I’ll just focus on singing them with all my heart. And I can encourage others to get acquainted with them all.
The lyrics are quite simple, yet they express our feelings so well. I particularly like the first line:
All my days I will sing this song of gladness
The very first night that I went to church after I committed my life to Christ in 1980, I mentioned to someone to make sure to keep a lookout for me if I stop coming. I was afraid that it might be a short term fad. He replied that there’s no reason why that should happen. He was confident that I had really given my life to Christ. And thankfully, he was right. That’s nearly 46 years ago. And I plan to sing the song of gladness for the rest of my life on earth and for eternity in heaven. This reminds me of the last verse of Amazing Grace:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
  Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
  Than when we first begun.
Here are some other versions, including a Stuart Townend guitar lesson for it:
Hibernia Gospel 