I kept my mouth from every sinful word

This highly distinctive Psalm, featuring in the Prayer Book service for the Burial of the Dead (though much less used now than formerly in that context) and entitled ‘No Fixed Abode’ by Kidner, has been rendered in some starkly contrasting ways. Hopkins in the ‘Old Version’ (1548–49) has I said, I will look to my ways; Christopher Smart (1765), With severest circumspection; James Montgomery (c1830, straightforwardly echoing Coverdale), Lord, let me know mine end. Providing a more contemporary flavour are Calvin Seerveld (1983) with Once I said, ‘I must keep quiet’; and Donald Davie (1988) with I said to myself: ‘That’s enough’; David Mowbray (1990) is more traditional and succinct with his Silent, I have waited, counting out my days. A believer in the early centuries reputedly asked an older friend how he should live; when the old man began to read Ps 39, he stopped him at v1; ‘That is enough for a whole life’ he said. But the Psalm does take the matter further; Ps 73, further still. Having decided that C H Spurgeon’s Behold, O God, my days are made left out too much of the Psalm, Jim Sayers at Kesgrave, Suffolk, resolved on a further attempt to be both accurate and relevant, and his version was accepted after some adjustments including a rewritten stz 6. Mindful of Coverdale’s (BCP) text, he says ‘I was keen to keep as many as possible of the well-turned phrases that have lodged themselves in the English memory’; hence (eg) the opening lines of stzs 2 and 4. Alfred Smith’s SURSUM CORDA (‘Hearts upwards’, not to be confused with the earlier tune by George Lomas in 6 4 6 4 10 10) was composed in 1941 for H Montagu Butler’s Lift up your hearts. It emerged from among 5000 tunes submitted anonymously for the American Episcopal Hymnal 1940, published in 1943. It was popularised in Britain by the 1951 BBC Hymn Book.

b Epsom, Surrey 1966. Ashcombe Sch Dorking, Univ Coll of Wales, Aberystwyth (LL.B) and Edinburgh Theological Seminary (DipTh, M.Th). After two and a half years as assistant to Brian Edwards at Hook Evangelical Ch (FIEC), Surbiton, he became Pastor of Kesgrave Grace Baptist Ch, Ipswich, Suffolk, from 1995. Then in 2009 he moved to Abingdon to become Communications Director of Grace Baptist Mission. In 2020 he moved to Didcot to lead a church-plant, Grace Church Didcot. He chaired the team selecting versions of the 150 Psalms for Praise! He became a trustee of Praise Trust in 2016, and chairman in 2018.

He has 10 published texts, as here, of which the first he wrote (1994) was based on Ps 30. Nos.2B, 30A, 39, 59, 69A, 71, 86, 719, 1013, 1249. He also wrote the revised version of O Holy Night CP47