Mark's Blog

The chorus was probably the most popular extra-curricular activity during my high school years at Fort Worth Christian.  Almost every student was in chorus, although only 40 could perform at any one time.

One of the reasons so many were in chorus was because we did lots of short trips to churches to present programs. We would present our program in area churches every Wednesday night and often on Sunday nights!  During the intermission in our program, the president of the school would speak about the advantages of Christian education and then pass the collection plate. I suspect what the students really liked was that when the bus returned to the school in the evening, we would all hold hands and sing Bless Be the Tie—a great time to hold hands with your new girlfriend!

At the conclusion of almost all of our programs, we would take requests from the audience.. We had a menu of around fifty hymns and songs that we were prepared to sing upon request.  A few of the songs on the menu were ALWAYS selected, such as My God and I, There Is A Balm in Gilead, and Just A Closer Walk With Thee, but I suspect that the one most often selected was How Great Thou Art.

That was the early 60s.  On April 17, 2013, George Beverly Shea died at the age of 104. He was the one who popularized How Great Thou Art in the United States in the early 50s, when he sang it as a theme for the Billy Graham Crusades.

But while he may be the single person most associated with this hymn, the hymn itself has as many people and diverse stories connected with it as it has versions and verses.

The original hymn was composed by Carl Gustav Boberg in Sweden in 1885 . O Store Gud originally had nine verses. One version of its origin talks about walking in nature, getting caught in a storm, and then watching the storm pass and thinking about the greatness of God.

Another version is that it was a paraphrase of Psalm 8 which was used in the underground church in Sweden during a time of persecution of Baptists and Mission Friends in the late 1800s.

I don’t see any reason why there can’t be a version where both of these hold true.

The hymn was first published in Sweden, but then traveled to Germany where it was translated into Wie Gross Bist Du or identified by the first words Du Grosser Gott, and as in Sweden became very popular.

From Germany it went to Russia. The Russian version is what a British Methodist missionary Stuart K Hines heard on a mission trip in Ukraine in 1931, who then translated, perhaps better said, paraphrased the meaning of the German/Russian translation into English, into what we today know as How Great Thou Art.

Hines also felt free to add new verses to the song. The story of the third verse goes like this according to one source:

It was typical of the Hines to inquire as to the existence of any Christians in the villages they visited. In one case, they found out that the only Christians that their host knew about were a man named Dmitri and his wife Lyudmila. Dmitri’s wife knew how to read — evidently a fairly rare thing at that time and in that place. She taught herself how to read because a Russian soldier had left a Bible behind several years earlier, and she started slowly learning by reading that Bible. When the Hines arrived in the village and approached Dmitri’s house, they heard a strange and wonderful sound: Dmitri’s wife was reading from the gospel of John about the crucifixion of Christ to a houseful of guests, and those visitors were in the very act of repenting. In Ukraine, this act of repenting is done very much out loud. So the Hines heard people calling out to God, saying how unbelievable it was that Christ would die for their own sins, and praising Him for His love and mercy. They just couldn’t barge in and disrupt this obvious work of the Holy Spirit, so they stayed outside and listened. Stuart wrote down the phrases he heard the Repenters use, and (even though this was all in Russian), it became the third verse that we know today: “And when I think that God, His Son not sparing, Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in.

The story of the fourth verse is equally as moving, although occurring seventeen years later. Hines was working among Russian refugees in England after World War II. In one particular camp where they only found two professing Christians, one of them told him this story:

One man to whom they were ministering told them an amazing story: he had been separated from his wife at the very end of the war, and had not seen her since. At the time they were separated, his wife was a Christian, but he was not, but he had since been converted. His deep desire was to find his wife so they could at last share their faith together. But he told the Hines that he did not think he would ever see his wife on earth again. Instead he was longing for the day when they would meet in heaven, and could share in the Life Eternal there. These words again inspired Hine, and they became the basis for his fourth and final verse to ‘How Great Thou Art’:

I first remember singing the song in the woods surrounding  Camp Deer Run in East Texas, but later in many beautiful natural settings around the world; I’ve sung the third verse in communion settings—quietly, reverently—and I’ve stood up to sing the fourth verse loudly with joyful anticipation of the resurrection.

It took Swedish Christians, German Christians, Russian Christians, and British Christians to give us today the song we love—a great lesson in community—a great lesson about God.

For God so loved the world . . . .