The Third Verse

“Please stand and sing verses 1, 2, and 4.”

The Third Verse

If you’ve ever been to church, you know how most of the hymn singing goes.

 “Please stand as we sing verses 1, 2, and 4.”  

Always leaving out verse 3.  

I’ve never really understood why that happens so often.  I WILL say my current choir director doesn’t do that.  She believes in singing all the verses.  She’ll say that many times a hymn tells a story and to leave out one of the verses is to leave out part of that story.  This is especially true of Charles Wesley’s hymns, almost every one of them is a tightly-reasoned theological statement.

Yet it happens all the time.  Verses 1 and 4, or the first and the last, are always the most popular.  You’d never leave off verse 1 or 4.  No choir director gets up and says “Please stand as we sing verses 2, 3, and 5.”  

I kinda hate it for the all the verse 3s out there.  

So many hymns with a great lyric or spiritual truth out there hardly ever sang about.  As a pastor friend said today, “Maybe we can just take a Sunday sometime and JUST SING the third verse!”  That’d be nice.

I know sometimes I can feel like a third verse.  Kinda overlooked.  Overshadowed.  Pushed to the side.  Forgotten about.  Not as important.  

You ever feel that way?

Well let me assure you…Jesus LOVES to sing the third verse.

And He loves you.

He will always leave the 99 sheep to go and save the 1.  He’ll always run out to greet you when maybe you’ve been gone but are now headed back home to Him. Even when others may seem to stand out more or get more attention, I assure you…He sees you.

And in turn, we should be on the lookout for those third verses out in the world. Don’t skip them. Pay them close attention. They have stories to tell too.

And the next time you’re in church, grab yourself a hymnal check out some of those third verses. You never know what melodies of grace you may hear.

Trae Wyatt

3/23/23