Galatians 6:14 vs. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”

Keith & Kristyn Getty · checked 2026-08-02

What we checked

PassageGalatians 6:14 chapter ↗

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asparaphrase

Categoryadditions / omissions

AlbumConfessio – Irish American Roots · 2021

Words addressed tovaries by section

Teaching or experiencemixed

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria this song presents words as scripture, so these apply

✓Text-faithful

✗Translation named

✓Context kept

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

The verse's boast-reversal survives intact: the sung text allows the singer no boast except the death of Christ, which is exactly the ground Galatians 6:14 stakes out
Labelled at the source. The 1707 heading names Galatians 6:14 above the text, a citation practice most modern worship has yet to recover
This recording sings Watts's standard stanzas with no added chorus and no modern rewrite
The omitted stanza is the one Watts himself bracketed as optional in 1709, so the cut follows the author's own instruction
The cross stays the centre of every stanza, and nothing the hymn says of Christ outruns what the text says

⚠ Cautions

Nothing at the point of singing carries the label. The Galatians reference lives in a 1707 book, not in the recording, the lyric video or any hymnal page a singer is likely to hold
The famous gain-and-loss ledger of the first stanza belongs to Philippians 3:7-8. One heading sits over a hymn that braids two passages, so keep the addresses straight
The verse's strongest clause is softened: in the text the world has been crucified to Paul and Paul to the world, a done double execution, while the hymn renders it as the singer sacrificing the world's charms, a decision still being made
No translation is involved. Watts wrote his own devotional response, so there is no wording to check a version against
One word of the final stanza as sung here is an 1831 hymnal editor's substitution, not Watts's

Verse Proof

Galatians 6:14

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“But as for me, may I never boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

Paul is closing his letter to the Galatian churches in his own oversized handwriting (6:11), drawing the whole argument to a point. The agitators want the Galatians circumcised so they can boast in flesh and dodge persecution for the cross (6:12-13). Against their boast Paul sets his only one: the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to him and he to the world. The sentence is a testimony with an edge, spoken by a man renouncing every credential he once counted.

What the song says, described not quoted

Isaac Watts published this hymn in 1707; this recording sings four of his five stanzas. The first has the singer looking hard at the cross where Christ died and re-pricing everything: his best assets marked down to losses, his pride treated with contempt. The second turns to the Lord directly and asks that the singer be kept from boasting in anything except Christ's death, handing over the attractive vanities of the world. The third summons the eyes back to the crucified body itself, head, hands and feet, where grief and love run down together, and asks whether the two ever met like this before, or thorns ever made such a crown. The last reasons that owning the whole created order would still be too small a gift, because love like this claims everything the singer is and has, and the recording repeats that closing thought once. The address shifts by section: only the second stanza speaks to the Lord; the rest speaks about Him or directs the singer's own gaze. The line count splits the same honest way, roughly ten lines enacting the singer's response against six describing Christ, which is why the mode and dwelling tags both read as mixed. The melody here is billed as traditional, arranged by Ben Shive, not the usual American HAMBURG tune.

The paraphrase label sits at the source, printed in 1707. Watts published the hymn as the seventh of twenty-two Lord's Supper hymns in Book III of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, under the heading "Crucifixion to the World, by the Cross of Christ. Gal. vi. 14." The label was on the page from the first edition. The second stanza is where the verse lives. Paul's resolve never to boast except in the cross becomes the singer's petition to be kept from boasting in anything but Christ's death, and the verse's crucified world becomes the world's charms handed over. The first stanza runs on a different passage: the ledger of gains counted as losses is Philippians 3:7-8, not Galatians. The third and fourth stanzas are Watts's own devotion, widening the verse's boast into a full response. Watts revised the text himself in 1709, adjusting the first stanza's royal title for Christ and bracketing the stanza about the dying body's crimson covering with a note that it "may be left out in Singing without disturbing the Sense." Congregations have mostly left it out since George Whitefield's 1757 collection, and this recording follows that practice.

~ Faithful & Labeled: Watts printed this hymn in 1707 under a heading naming Galatians 6:14. The sung text still carries the verse's boast-reversal faithfully. But no modern performance carries the heading.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

Watts labelled the hymn in 1707. The centuries carried the words and left the label on the page.

Why it matters

This hymn is the era's labelling practice at its best. Watts did on his own page what this site asks of every song: he named the text he was working from, right above the first line. Three centuries later the hymn is sung everywhere and the heading is sung nowhere, because transmission keeps tunes and words and drops everything printed around them.

That is worth knowing in both directions. A modern listener meets an unreferenced hymn and cannot tell it was labelled at birth. And a song that looks unlabelled today may carry a documented label one library visit away. The proof of what a hymn presents itself as is often in its first printing, not its latest performance.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song moves between God and the singer.

What this hymn plants by repetition is a pricing exercise. Every loop walks the same ledger: look at the cross, mark the singer's best possessions down to losses, refuse every boast but one, and end with love claiming soul, life, all. That is Paul's own movement in Galatians 6:14 and Philippians 3:7-8, rehearsed until it is memorized. The dwelling tag is mixed because the singer is in most of the lines, but notice the posture: the first person appears only ever in the act of looking at Christ and surrendering something. Repetition here does not rehearse the singer's circumstances; it rehearses divestment. The one thing the loop cannot supply is the verse's finished tense. The text says the crucifixion of the world to the singer has already happened; the hymn keeps asking for it. Read the verse after singing and let the done deed steady the ongoing prayer.

Helpful comparison

One detail shows how deep the hymn's roots go into a particular English Bible. In the BSB the verse's opening is a plain wish, may I never boast, and nobody is being spoken to. The King James renders the same clause with its famous exclamation, God forbid, an idiom in which God is invoked but not actually addressed. Watts, writing with the King James open, took the idiom literally and made it a real petition: his second stanza asks the Lord to do the forbidding. A translator's turn of phrase became the hymn's act of prayer. Nothing in that is unfaithful, the request is one the text's author would surely co-sign, but it is a clean example of a lyric descending from one translation's English rather than from the sentence underneath it.

Sources

Keith & Kristyn Getty — When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, lyric video · (the recording checked for this proof, KeithandKristyn Getty channel; the description places it on the album Confessio)
Apple Music — Confessio - Irish American Roots · (album release October 29, 2021, Getty Music Label)
Getty Music — official sheet music preview · (words by Isaac Watts, music traditional arranged by Ben Shive; the arrangement's stanza structure)
Hymnary.org — When I Survey the Wondrous Cross · (the 1707 heading "Crucifixion to the World, by the Cross of Christ. Gal. vi. 14."; five original stanzas; the 1831 Stowell substitution in the final stanza)
Hymnology Archive — When I survey the wondrous cross · (seventh of twenty-two Lord's Supper texts in Book III of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707; the 1709 revisions and Watts's bracket note; ROCKINGHAM and HAMBURG tune history)
Wikipedia — When I Survey the Wondrous Cross · (Galatians 6:14 and Philippians 3:7-8 as the verse sources; the fourth stanza commonly omitted since Whitefield, 1757; the 1709 first-stanza revision)

Corrections

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