The Jewel and the Setting

Isaac Watts stood barely five feet tall. His head was disproportionately large for his frame, and by most accounts of the day, he was not a handsome man. When the poet Elizabeth Singer declined his marriage proposal, her words cut deep: she admired the jewel, she said, but not the setting.

It would have been easy for Watts to turn bitter. Instead, he turned to hymn-writing and became the father of English hymnody. Over his lifetime, he composed more than 750 hymns, including Joy to the World and O God, Our Help in Ages Past. But it was his most intimate hymn that revealed what rejection had taught him about humility. In When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Watts wrote: "All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to His blood."

Watts learned what many of us resist: that our worth was never in the setting. It was never in our appearance, our reputation, or the world's approval. The cross strips all of that away. And when it does, we discover something liberating — we are free to stop performing and start worshiping.

Philippians 2:3 tells us to "in humility value others above yourselves." Watts didn't just write those words into hymns. He lived them — a man who made himself small so that the Almighty could be made great.