24/05/2022
✨ START YOUR DAY WITH JESUS THROUGH HYMNS ✨
*JOHN & CHARLES WESLEY CONVERSION DAY*
📆 Date: 24.05.2022
📝 Title: WHEN SHALL MY WONDERING SOUL BEGIN
✍🏻 Author: CHARLES WESLEY (1707-1788).
🔅Meter: 8.8.8.8.8.8
🎼Tunes: OLD 23RD
WESLEY'S CONVERSION HYMN
1. Where shall my wondering soul begin?
How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,
A brand plucked from eternal fire,
How shall I equal triumphs raise,
Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?
2. O how shall I the goodness tell,
Father, which Thou to me hast showed?
That I, a child of wrath and hell,
I should be called a child of God,
Should know, should feel my sins forgiven,
Blessed with this antepast of Heaven!
3. And shall I slight my Father’s love?
Or basely fear His gifts to own?
Unmindful of His favors prove?
Shall I, the hallowed cross to shun,
Refuse His righteousness to impart,
By hiding it within my heart?
4. Outcasts of men, to you I call,
Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!
He spreads His arms to embrace you all;
Sinners alone His grace receives;
No need of Him the righteous have;
He came the lost to seek and save.
5. Come, O my guilty brethren, come,
Groaning beneath your load of sin,
His bleeding heart shall make you room,
His open side shall take you in;
He calls you now, invites you home;
Come, O my guilty brethren, come!
*EXHORTATION*
“Where shall my wondering soul begin?” — an apt question to ask when facing the formidable task of presenting, arguably, the greatest hymn writer of our faith, the venerable Charles Wesley.
A hymn that John Wesley used to refer to himself, recalling his rescue as a small child from the burning manse in Epworth.
The hymn is of course appropriate for singing when recalling the beginnings of Methodism and the lives of John and Charles Wesley. Charles’s “conversion hymn” also celebrates at any time a core belief of Methodists: that God’s grace is available to all and is gifted to us even before we seek it out. It is a fine congregational h
