Three Letters That Changed Everything

In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach arrived in Leipzig, Germany, to take up his post as Thomaskantor — director of music at St. Thomas Church. He was forty-eight years old, a working musician with a large family to feed and a demanding schedule that required him to produce new cantatas nearly every week. He was not yet the towering figure history would remember. He was simply a craftsman doing his job.

Yet at the bottom of manuscript after manuscript, Bach inscribed three Latin letters: S.D.G. — Soli Deo Gloria. "To God alone be the glory." He wrote these letters not only on his sacred cantatas and passions but on secular works as well — keyboard pieces, orchestral suites, works composed for courts and coffeehouses. At the top of many scores he wrote J.J. — Jesu Juva, "Jesus, help." Every composition began with a prayer and ended with a surrender.

Here was a man of extraordinary genius who understood that his gift was not his own. The hands that wrote the Mass in B Minor and the St. Matthew Passion pointed away from themselves toward their Maker.

Paul wrote in Romans 11:36, "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever." Bach lived those words with ink and parchment. Every note was borrowed. Every melody was returned.

The question for us is simple: What are we inscribing at the bottom of our work? Whether we teach, build, heal, or serve — can we write S.D.G. over all of it and mean it?