#745: Lord, Teach Us How to Pray Aright

[lutheranhymns]

How's the rhyme scheme?

It's actually pretty dense, but sometimes this can be hidden by the flow of the text. Verse 3:

"Give deep humility; the sense of godly sorrow give; a strong desire, with confidence, to hear your voice and live."

"sense" gets the musical stress, and rhymes with "confidence" in line 3. But based on how we punctuate it and would actually speak it as text, that gets hidden.

"Dust and ashes"?

There are songs that put that phrase together in reference to, say, Ash Wednesday, when people sometimes wear ashes to signify repentance. But this is kind of dark in that it's saying we are mere dust and ashes from God's point of view!