Jesus Paid It All

Shane & Shane work from Elvina Hall's 1865 text, and its opening move is unusual for a worship song — it starts with weakness rather than strength: 'thy strength indeed is small, child of weakness, watch and pray.' The hymn doesn't ask the singer to feel powerful before approaching God; it names the smallness first and lets that be the actual starting point.

'Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow' lifts Isaiah 1:18's image directly, and the title refrain answers the opening admission of weakness with the one thing that doesn't depend on the singer's own strength: 'Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe.' 'Can change the leper's spots and melt the heart of stone' names two separate kinds of impossible change in one line — physical and internal — treating both as equally within reach of 'thy pow'r, and thine alone.' The closing verse moves from present tense to a future scene, standing before the throne 'complete,' still repeating the same refrain the hymn opened with, unchanged by the passage of time being imagined.