This is The Day That The Lord Has Made

Fred Hammond's “This is The Day That The Lord Has Made” takes a single verse and lets it carry a whole song. The text is Psalm 118:24 in its familiar worship form, “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it,” sung with the echoes of a congregation answering back in parentheses. Nothing else is added to the words, so the arrangement does the work.

The shape is call and response. A leader sings “This is the day” and the group repeats the next phrase back, “that the Lord has made,” then moves from “we will rejoice” to the more personal “I will rejoice and be glad in it.” That shift from plural to singular is the only change in the lyrics, and it lets a group chant turn into an individual decision about how to treat the day ahead.

Psalm 118:24 is the verse behind it, from a psalm of thanksgiving that celebrates God's deliverance and his lasting love. The song is short enough to be used as an opening or a response in a service, and its repetition makes it easy for a large room to learn on the first pass.