SEARCH ME

A monthly series on inspiring hymns.

A hundred years ago in Ireland, a little nine-year-old boy prayed to become a Christian. His life would end at age 75 across the Atlantic in Asheville, N.C., where the next day he was to speak at a Southern Baptist convention. By then James Edwin Orr was known world-wide as an evangelist and historian of revival movements.

But first came his youth and the death of his father and older brother. Forced to leave college, he worked in a bakery to support his mother and siblings. At 19, he and a friend began open-air evangelism in Belfast. At 23, he believed God was calling him to be a traveling evangelist, and was soon preaching across Britain. Then he sailed to Canada for meetings, held more in the United States, and then went on to New Zealand, Australia, and Africa, concluding with meetings in Norway.

By then, he felt he needed to rest—and also needed a helpmate. He telegraphed a young woman he'd met in South Africa and proposed. She agreed. They held an evangelistic meeting at their wedding reception.

Orr's evangelistic travels (including a stint as a chaplain in the Air Force, seeing service in the South Pacific) would take him around the world—150 countries including the Soviet Union. Said another way, he preached in two-thirds of the world's 600 major cities. He was also a scholar, with earned doctorates from universities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America—including a Ph.D. From Oxford, and a Ed.D. From UCLA. He became known as the foremost authority on the world's great revivals, with his doctoral dissertation on the Second Great Awakening in England in the mid 1800s. He wrote numerous books, sometimes two a year.

His studies pointed to one major fact of revivals: they had to begin with prayer. He once wrote: “Little by little, the church loses its grip on essential things, becomes a social club, goes to sleep or flies off at a tangent. All over the world we find sleeping churches, and all around them are the gospel-starved masses. Instead of performing the first things of importance, evangelizing the masses, they are engaged in a bewildering variety of pastimes—anything but the real thing.”

Located on the north island of New Zealand's up-side-down
"boot," the town where Orr evangelized was named
for a 17th century tribal-healing wedding reception

Yet for all his scholarly and evangelistic work, Orr is best remembered for a simple hymn that grew out of revival meetings he held in Ngaruawahia (N-gu-ru-WAH-hee-a), New Zealand when he was only 24 years old. Covered by intense prayer, the meetings resulted in huge numbers of conversions, reconciliations between believers, and hearty singing in services.

When Orr prepared to leave the country, four Maori girls approached him with a beautiful indigenous song of farewell. He couldn't forget the beautiful melody, and English words for it starting coming to him, based on Psalm 139:23-24. Quickly he jotted them down on the back of an envelope. Eventually, that hymn would become popularized throughout Australia in the 1930s and through the English-speaking world.

It was said of him: “Some men read history, some write it, and others make it. So far as the history of religious revivals is concerned, J. Edwin Orr belongs to all three categories.”

A longish commercial precedes the music video. Click on "skip ad" to hear this inspiring hymn sung by an all-men chorus:

The Cathedrals - Search Me O God (Live) - YouTube

Considering reading through the uplifting comments by listeners below the video.