The Song He Almost Never Wrote

In 1707, Isaac Watts sat in a small English chapel, frustrated. The congregation had just sung another dreary, plodding psalm arrangement, and Watts complained to his father that surely the church could do better. His father's response was simple: "Then write something better yourself."

What followed was a lifetime of sacrifice. Watts poured himself into hymn writing at a time when many churches considered anything beyond direct psalm singing to be borderline heretical. He faced public ridicule. Fellow ministers questioned his faithfulness. His health deteriorated severely — he suffered from a nervous condition that left him physically broken for much of his adult life, dependent on the charity of friends for housing and care.

Yet from that frail body and battered reputation came over 750 hymns, including one that would become the most published hymn in the English language: When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. "Love so amazing, so divine," he wrote, "demands my soul, my life, my all."

Watts understood sacrifice not as theology alone but as lived experience. He had given his comfort, his reputation, and his health to put worship on the lips of ordinary believers. And when he wrote about the cross, he wrote as someone who knew what it cost to lay something precious down.

The Almighty rarely asks us to sacrifice what we will not miss. He asks for what matters most — and then transforms it into something that outlasts us.