Featured Hymn for May 12: He leadeth me: O blessed thought!

On a Wednesday evening, Joseph Gilmore was preaching at a mid-week prayer service on the topic of Psalm 23. He wrote later, “I set out to give the people an exposition of the 23rd Psalm, but I got no further than the words ‘He leadeth me.’ Those words took hold of me as they had never done before. I saw in them a significance and beauty of which I had never dreamed…At the close of the meeting a few of us kept on talking about the thoughts which I had emphasized; and then and there, on a back page of my sermon notes, I penciled the hymn just as it stands today, handed it to my wife, and thought no more of it…She sent it without my knowledge to the Watchman and Reflector magazine, and there it first appeared in print December 4, 1862” (Psalter Hymnal Handbook, 616).

Lectio Devina is a common devotional practice in which one spends a significant amount of time reflecting and meditating on one verse of Scripture, or a short passage. It is amazing what the Holy Spirit can say to us when we take time to listen and ponder, but also, like Gilmore, what we hear when we least expect it, such as when we read through as familiar a passage as Psalm 23.

View worship notes, composer biographies, historical information and more about this featured hymn at www.hymnary.org.