Song of the Heart

A song is a wonderful kind of thing,

So lift up your voice and sing!

Just start a glad song, let it float, let it ring,

And lift up your voice and sing!

Boys and girls in Primary and Sunday School all over the world do lift up their voices in song. But many of them do not know that just three months after the organization of the Church, the Lord revealed His feeling about singing to the Prophet Joseph Smith.

In a revelation given at Harmony, Pennsylvania, in July 1830, the Lord directed the Prophet’s wife Emma to make a selection of sacred hymns to be compiled into the first Latter-day Saint hymnbook (published two years later). And then He said:

For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads (D&C 25:12).

Illustrated by Dale Kilbourn