Jesus Paid It All

Don Moen's recording keeps Elvina Hall's nineteenth-century hymn text intact, and it opens somewhere unexpected for a hymn about redemption: with weakness named first. "I hear the savior say, thy strength indeed is small, child of weakness, watch and pray, find in me thine all in all."

The refrain that follows is almost entirely made of debt language: "all to Him I owe, sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow." Nothing in the hymn suggests the singer contributed anything to the transaction beyond the sin itself.

The second verse makes that explicit: "for nothing good have I, whereby Thy grace to claim." Paul's description of grace as a gift, not earned by works, and Isaiah's promise that scarlet sins can become white as snow both sit underneath a hymn that spends three verses refusing to let the singer take any credit — the title isn't a summary tacked on afterward, it's the hymn's entire argument in four words.