How Sweet and Awful is the Place

[1]
How sweet and awful is the place
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores!

[2]
Here every kindness of our God
With soft compassion rolls;
Here peace and pardon bought with blood
Is food for dying souls.

[3]
While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
“Lord, why was I a guest?

[4]
“Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there’s room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?“

[5]
‘Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly drew us in;
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.

[6]
Pity the nations, O our God!
Constrain the earth to come;
Send Thy victorious Word abroad,
And bring the strangers home.

[7]
We long to see Thy churches full,
That all the chosen race
May with one voice, and heart and soul,
Sing Thy redeeming grace.