A few months ago I came across Psalm 93 and immediately fell in love with the first four verses:

Sing to the Lord a new song;
    sing to the Lord, all the earth.
² Sing to the Lord, praise his name;
    proclaim his salvation day after day.
³ Declare his glory among the nations,
    his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
⁴ For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise;
    he is to be feared above all gods.

I’m not a terrific memorizer, but God’s Holy Spirit put in my heart that I should learn it. So I memorized it one verse at a time day after day. When I was pretty comfortable with the first three verses and a little less with the fourth, I sat down with my guitar and started noodling around. (“Noodling around” is a technical musical term meaning exactly what it sounds like: “fiddling around”.)

I don’t normally write a song that way. I usually have the beginning notes come to me in a dream or even when I’m doing something totally unrelated to music. So having a tune come so easily was unexpectedly wonderful. As always, however, I refined the tune somewhat over a period of days.

But that part of the tune only covered the first two verses. Then I saw a reference to Psalm 150: 6 in a devotional I was reading. I made note of it and came back to it later and added it to the first two verses, soon coming up with a tune for that part, too.

That just left verses three and four. The tune for #3 grew naturally from what had come before, but I was having problems with #4. Because verse 4 refers to the Lord as One to be “feared above all gods,” it didn’t seem like a contemporary way to describe God’s superiority since Christians consider God to be the only God. As you can see from the lyrics below, I felt led to describe God as “most worthy of all to be praised.”

l wanted to mention that because it is the only deviation from the NIV translation of the Scripture. Otherwise, you could sing the song directly from the Scripture.

An audio recording is found here, and a free lead sheet is here.

So, the very short song ended up being worded thusly:

Sing to the Lord a new song.
Sing to the Lord all the earth.
Sing to the Lord, praise His name
And proclaim His salvation day after day.

Let all who have breath praise the Lord.

Declare His glory among the nations,
His marvelous deeds among all peoples.

For great is the Lord
And most worthy of all to be praised.

As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve not only written more than two hundred songs, but twenty-four Christian novels. The rough draft of #25 is finished and I’m in the process of editing and revising it.

The Devil and Pastor Gus is one of my favorites. Below the graphic for that book is a graphic displaying the covers of the twenty-four.

Links you might be interested in:
My website
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