The Wonderful Cross

Michael W. Smith's arrangement keeps Isaac Watts' eighteenth-century verses almost word for word, updated only by Chris Tomlin and Jesse Reeves' added chorus. "My richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride" is a striking thing to still be singing three centuries later — not gratitude exactly, but a kind of willing demotion of everything else.

The second verse stays close to the physical scene rather than abstracting it: "see from His head, His hands, His feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down." Watts doesn't separate the suffering from the love; they arrive in the same image, "did e'er such love and sorrow meet."

Paul made the identical trade centuries earlier, boasting in nothing except the cross and counting everything else as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. His description of the cross's message as foolishness to some but power to others explains why a song built on "contempt" and "loss" can still land as worship rather than despair — the last line makes the logic explicit: "love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all."