I Stand Amazed

Charles H  Gabriel 

1856-1932

In the early 1900s, Charles H. Gabriel (1856-1932) was the king of gospel music.

Six years after the Civil War ended, lingering war melodies inspired a 15-year-old Iowa boy to tell his parents that he planned to become a songwriter. While his father was a traveling music teacher and certainly supported these aspirations, it was the boy’s mother who challenged him to make a habit of scribbling down his own words and music after finishing his farm work each day. In response to the boy’s wish to become famous, she said, “I would rather have you write a song that will help somebody than see you President of the United States.”

 

 Her hopes for her son came true, and the song we sing this weekend, “I Stand Amazed,” is one of more than 7,000 songs written and composed by Charles Hutchinson Gabriel. Known as the “Master of Missionary Music,” Gabriel led worship next to evangelist Billy Sunday and encouraged many listeners through the years to hear the “Macedonian call” (Acts 16:6-10) and “send the light” around the world. 

 

 Using a host of pseudonyms such as Charlotte Homer, Jennie Rea and S.B. Jackson, the prolific songwriter’s full body of work is hard to corral or define. (Seven thousand songs is a modest estimate.) One common thread throughout many of Gabriel’s lyrics is the high honor and sense of indebtedness to spread the gospel.

He wrote under numerous pseudonyms, making it difficult to know the precise number of songs he wrote. And Charles is credited with writing more tunes for other texts’ writers; including “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

But the hymn that seems to have had the longest life is this hymn, “I Stand Amazed in the Presence”; it sounds like it could have been written today! This hymn focuses on a single thought… a single emotion… and celebrates it. That thought? The raw amazement at the incredible sacrifice of Christ!

 

 This song is a song of gratitude for the atoning death of Jesus Christ and is based on Luke's account of Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. This story is only found in Luke's gospel and not in the other gospels.

 Luke 22:41-44 reads, "And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground" (KJV).

Maybe we still love this song because we can identify with that amazement. How marvelous! How wonderful!