It’s Father’s Day in the States, so I could have chosen a hymn with the word father in the first line, but I wanted to finish the month with songs of God the Father, and so we have today’s hymn. “Exalt the Lord, His Praise Proclaim” is a paraphrase of Psalm 135:1-7, 21 written for the Trinity Psalter of 1912. The tune is from Hayden’s The Creation oratorio. It’s grand and noble music, but I had to speed up the video to 1.5x. Maybe I’m singing hymns at a faster pace lately.
1 Exalt the Lord, his praise proclaim;
all ye his servants, praise his name,
who in the Lord’s house ever stand
and humbly serve at his command.
The Lord is good, his praise proclaim;
since it is pleasant, praise his name;
his people for his own he takes
and his peculiar treasure makes.
2 I know the Lord is high in state,
above all gods our Lord is great;
the Lord performs what he decrees,
in heav’n and earth, in depths and seas.
He makes the vapors to ascend
in clouds from earth’s remotest end;
the lightnings flash at his command;
he holds the tempest in his hand.
3 Exalt the Lord, his praise proclaim;
all ye his servants, praise his name,
who in the Lord’s house ever stand
and humbly serve at his command.
Forever praise and bless his name,
and in the church his praise proclaim;
in Zion is his dwelling place;
praise ye the Lord, show forth his grace.