I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord

Timothy Dwight, a grandson of the New England preacher Jonathan Edwards, was born in Massachusetts in 1752. At the age of four he could read the Bible, at six he was enrolled in grammar school, and at thirteen he entered Yale College.  

Ordained to the Congregational ministry, he served as a chaplain in the Continental Army. A close friend of George Washington, Dwight became one of the most influential intellectual leaders during the first decades of the new republic of the United States. For seventeen years he served as president of Yale College.

“I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord” was written in 1801. It is the oldest American hymn sung in our churches today. Dwight uses the words “kingdom,” “house,” “church,” and “Zion” to mean the same thing - God’s people, the church. The hymn speaks unashamedly of love and adoration for the church.

The Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want

In the early 1640s, Francis Rouse, an English Puritan, rendered all 150 Psalms from the Hebrew into metrical English. The General Assembly of the church of Scotland, meeting in Edinburgh, took Rouse’s translation and submitted it to revision committees. These committees spent six years comparing the metered Psalms with the original Hebrew, seeking to develop a singable translation that was accurate to the original Hebrew. They worked as painstakingly as if creating a new translation of the Bible.

Finally, in 1650, the Scottish Psalter was released and approved for congregations of the Church of Scotland. Its full title was: The Psalms of David in Meeter: Newly translated, and diligently compared with the original Text, and former Translations: More plain, smooth, and agreeable to the Text, than any heretofore.

Though the Scottish Psalter of 1650 is one of the great treasures of hymnody, the only portion widely sung beyond Scotland is its beautiful rendition of Psalm 23.