Sacred Sunday: An 18th-Century Hymn About Having Nothing Left to Bring, Three Ways, Plus Three Songs About Who Tells You Who You Are

What Sacred Sunday Is

Every Sunday, Song Reviews takes sacred music seriously enough to actually criticize it – what the music does, where it came from, and whether it earns the reaction it asks for, the same way any other day’s coverage works. It isn’t a tribute day. Every entry carries a real score.

What We’re Covering Today

The Hymn

“Rock of Ages” traces to Augustus Toplady’s 1763 text, built around the stark admission that the singer has “nothing in my hand” to offer and nowhere else to turn. Three recordings, 1956 to 2005:

• Tennessee Ernie Ford – 7.7/10. From 1956’s Hymns, the first religious album ever certified Gold, sung as plainly as the weekly television sign-off it originally was.
• Johnny Cash – 8.0/10. From 1975’s Sings Precious Memories, carrying the specific weight of a man who had already very publicly needed what the hymn asks for.
• Amy Grant with Vince Gill – 7.9/10. From 2005’s Rock of Ages… Hymns and Faith, a married couple singing the text as a literal duet.

New Religious Songs

• Kirk Franklin feat. GloRilla – “This Time” – 7.8/10. A joyous gospel-rap crossover built on a Mandrill sample, just named Franklin the first artist with double-digit Hot Gospel Songs No. 1s.
• Josiah Queen – “sundays” – 7.5/10. A fan-voted single arguing that faith can’t run on a once-a-week fill-up.
• Anne Wilson – “Who I Am to You” – 7.4/10. A self-worth anthem that relocates identity outside the self entirely.

What Connects Them

“Rock of Ages” is a hymn about radical dependence – the admission that nothing the singer personally brings to the table is enough, so all three words of its most famous line (“simply to Thy cross I cling”) describe an act of total reliance rather than self-sufficiency. All three of this week’s new songs are circling some version of that same question – where does a person’s actual foundation come from, if not from themselves – from genuinely different angles. Anne Wilson’s “Who I Am to You” is the most direct descendant: a song explicitly about replacing a self-generated, failing sense of worth with one defined entirely from outside herself, which is close to the hymn’s own structure translated into the specific language of modern self-esteem. Josiah Queen’s “sundays” approaches the same idea sideways, through sustenance rather than identity – the hymn’s “cling” becomes Queen’s blunter metaphor about a car that can’t run all week on one Sunday fill-up, but the underlying claim (you cannot supply this yourself; it has to come from somewhere outside the one-day performance) is the same one Toplady’s text is making.

Kirk Franklin and GloRilla’s “This Time” is the odd one out, and deliberately so – a song of unfiltered gratitude and celebration rather than need or dependence, built to be loud and danced to rather than sat with quietly. That contrast is the week’s actual takeaway: a 263-year-old hymn about having nothing left to offer, a CCM artist publicly working through a hard year of self-doubt, a crowd-voted single about faith as daily maintenance, and a gospel-rap record that skips the struggle entirely to land on pure celebration are all legitimate responses to the same underlying claim about where a person’s foundation has to come from. The hymn and the Wilson song do the harder work of sitting inside the discomfort before resolving it. Queen’s song states the principle plainly without dwelling in the difficulty. Franklin and GloRilla skip past the struggle stage entirely and arrive straight at the joy on the other side of it. None of those approaches is wrong; they’re just different points on the same line, and hearing all three next to the hymn that started it is the point of putting them in the same column.

Hero image: Kirk Franklin at JoyFest, 2017, by CL Holly, licensed under CC BY 2.0.