How Sweet and Awful Is the Place

How sweet and awful is the place

With Christ within the doors

While everlasting love displays

The choicest of her stores.

While all our hearts and all our songs

Join to admire the feast

Each of us cry with thankful tongues,

"Lord, why was I a guest?"

"Why was I made to hear thy voice

and enter while there's room,

When thousands make a wretched choice

And rather starve than come?"

'Twas the same love that spread the feast

that sweetly drew us in;

Else we had still refused to taste

and perished in our sin

Pity the nations, O our God,

Constrain the earth to come;

Send thy victorious Word abroad

and bring the strangers home.

We long to see thy churches full,

that all the chosen race

may with one voice and heart and soul

sing thy redeeming grace.

Issac Watts 1707