Psalm 104:27-34 vs. “Rejoice in All Your Works (Psalm 104)”

Wendell Kimbrough · checked 2026-08-02

What we checked

PassagePsalm 104:27-34 chapter ↗ 2 more proofs on Psalm 104 →

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asparaphrase

Categoryadditions / omissions

AlbumPsalms We Sing Together · 2016

Words addressed toGod, person unspecified

Teaching or experiencescripture set to music

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 chorus keeps Psalm 104:31's direction: God is asked to rejoice in His own works, and the congregation's rejoicing is a second, answering line
The title names the psalm on the cover, so the paraphrase is honest and checkable
Verse 1 compresses verses 27-28 without changing what they say: creation looks to God, and is satisfied from His hand
The song was written for congregational psalm singing, out of a weekly practice of setting the psalm being read; the craft context is documented

⚠ Cautions

The bridge names the Son, whom Psalm 104 never mentions. Colossians 1:16 supports the theology, but the line is the New Testament's, not the psalm's
The psalm's shadows are gone: verse 29's dying creatures and verse 35's prayer against the wicked have no counterpart in the song
No translation is named, and as a paraphrase the wording matches no translation word for word, so it can only be checked against the psalm's sense

Verse Proof

Psalm 104:27-34

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“All creatures look to You to give them their food in due season. When You give it to them, they gather it up; when You open Your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When You hide Your face, they are terrified; when You take away their breath, they die and return to dust. When You send Your Spirit, they are created, and You renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in His works. He looks on the earth, and it trembles; He touches the mountains, and they smolder. I will sing to the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. May my meditation be pleasing to Him, for I rejoice in the LORD.”

Psalm 104 is a creation psalm that walks roughly the order of Genesis 1: light, sky, waters, springs, grass and wine and bread, trees and nesting birds, moon and sun, sea and ships. By verse 27 the walk arrives at its point: every creature waits on God for food and breath, and when He sends His Spirit the face of the earth is renewed. Verse 31 turns to petition. The psalmist asks that the LORD's glory endure and that the LORD rejoice in His own works, then vows to sing all his life and asks that his meditation please God. The full psalm has one more verse the span above stops short of: verse 35 prays that sinners vanish from the earth, then ends in praise.

What the song says, described not quoted

Two verses, a chorus, and a bridge, all addressed to God. The first verse compresses verses 27 and 28 into a picture of universal dependence: mouths needing food, lungs needing breath, eyes searching for light, all of creation looking to God and being satisfied from His hand. The second verse works the psalm's earlier landscape: rain for thirsty trees, birds looking for a place to nest, hearts waiting to be made glad. The chorus is built on verse 31, and it keeps the psalm's surprising address: God Himself, named with royal titles, is the one asked to rejoice in what He has made, and only then does the congregation add its own answering line of rejoicing with mountain, sky, and sea. The bridge is verse 34 turned into a prayer that the singer's inner ponderings and outward song join creation's praise, and it closes by naming the sustaining Spirit and the Son who reigns over creation.

The title names the psalm, and the paraphrase stays close where it goes: dependence for food and breath (vv. 27-28), renewal (v. 30), the petition that God rejoice in His works (v. 31), the meditation of the heart (v. 34). Two things shift. The bridge names the Son, whom Psalm 104 never mentions; that is the New Testament's reading of creation (Colossians 1:16) sung back into the psalm, alongside the Spirit the psalm does name in verse 30. And the song ends in unbroken brightness: verse 35's prayer against the wicked, and verses 29's dying creatures, are left out. No translation is named, which is normal for a paraphrase but leaves nothing to check word against word.

~ Faithful & Labeled: A labeled paraphrase that tracks Psalm 104's petitions accurately. It keeps verse 31's address to God intact. It adds a trinitarian close the psalm does not contain, and omits the psalm's darker verses. No translation is named.

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

The psalm asks God to rejoice in His own works, and the song has the nerve to keep asking.

Why it matters

Verse 31 is one of the strangest petitions in the psalter: the psalmist prays that God would rejoice in God's own works. A songwriter reaching for a singable chorus could easily flatten that into a command to the congregation, and the title, read cold, sounds like exactly that. The song does not flatten it. Whether a setting keeps or quietly reverses the direction of a psalm's imperatives is a real test of faithfulness, and it is checkable by anyone with the psalm open.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

What repetition plants here is the psalm's economy of dependence: food, breath, and light arrive from an open hand, and the right response is to ask God to enjoy what He has made and to join in. That is a rare thing to rehearse. Most sung gratitude points at the gifts; this points at the Giver's own gladness. The bridge adds the habit of Psalm 104:34, offering the heart's private ponderings to God along with the mouth's public song, which is the repeat test working in the song's favor: loop it and you practice wanting your thoughts to please Him. The words dwell on God throughout; the singer appears only to bring his meditation and join the choir of made things.

Helpful comparison

Set the song beside the psalm's own ending and the one real omission shows. Psalm 104 does not end at verse 34; verse 35 asks that sinners vanish from the earth before the final hallelujah. Nearly every congregational setting drops that verse, and this one is no exception. The omission is worth knowing about rather than condemning: the song does not say it is the whole psalm, and a paraphrase that names its source leaves the reader one step from the verses it left out. The addition runs the other way. The Spirit the bridge names is in the psalm (verse 30); the Son is not, and comes from reading creation through Colossians 1:16. That is the church's oldest habit with the psalter, praying the Trinity at the end of a psalm, and it is honest as long as the seam is visible.

Sources

Wendell Kimbrough — Rejoice In All Your Works (Psalm 104), Bandcamp · (official track page: album, September 2016 release, words and music © 2014 Wendell Kimbrough, full credits)
Wendell Kimbrough — Rejoice In All Your Works (Psalm 104), YouTube · (the recording checked for this proof, on the artist's own channel)
Greg Scheer — Psalm 104: Oh, Rejoice in All Your Works · (the setting won Church of the Servant's New Psalm Contest, dated 2014 on the page; Scheer's arrangements)
The Musical Diary of Greg Scheer — Kimbrough's Psalm 104 · (church premiere January 2015; the original described as a guitar-driven folk song)
Calvin Institute of Christian Worship — Wendell Kimbrough on the Psalms · (Kimbrough as a songwriter and worship leader in southern Alabama; the weekly practice of writing congregational refrains for the psalm being read, which produced the album)
Hymnary.org — Rejoice in All Your Works · (author, Psalm 104 scripture reference, inclusion in Psalms of Grace, 2022)
Wendell Kimbrough — official site · (bio: seventeen years leading worship in DC, Alabama, and Dallas; psalm-based congregational writing)

Corrections

No corrections to this proof yet.

Think we got something wrong? Tell us what and where, and we will check it against the text. Real errors get fixed here, dated, in public. Every correction on the site →