God of truth, and power and love

Verse 1
God of truth, and power, and love,
Father, friend of all mankind,
Let on me thy Spirit move,
Influence my feeble mind;
’Twixt the serpent’s seed and me
Prevalently interpose,
Break the fatal amity,
Make us everlasting foes.

Verse 2
Sin hath poison’d all my soul,
Sin the serpent’s cursed seed:
No one part in me is whole;
Yet will I the promise plead,
Promise of all-saving grace,
Promise of an inward power,
Able to redeem the race,
Me, and all men to restore.

Verse 3
Breathe the breath of simple life,
Oh! Be Abel born in me
Previous to the legal strife,
Innocent simplicity:
Give me childishness t’ oppose
To the subtle serpent’s art;
Childishness no evil knows,
Give me, Lord, a simple heart.

Verse 4
Or if pride hath this destroy’d
Turn’d into self-righteousness,
Let the law supply the void,
Seth succeed in Abel’s place.
Deeply root thy law within
Parent of the wretched man:
Check my forwardness to sin,
Forcibly by fear restrain.

Verse 5
Bind in me the strong-man bind
With the fetters of the law,
Curb, and thwart the carnal mind,
Keep the man of sin in awe,
Enemy to all that’s good,
Never will he quite give place;
He can only be subdu’d,
By the sense of pard’ning grace.

Verse 6
Tell me, Jesus died for me,
Shew some token of his love;
Love and sin can ne’er agree,
Love shall still the stronger prove:
Love in the first measure give,
Sin shall then no longer sway,
Flesh may for a season strive,
I the Spirit shall obey.

Verse 7
Patiently I then shall wait
For the woman’s noblest seed,
JESUS CHRIST the MIGHTY HATE,
Bruiser of the serpent’s head;
O reveal thy Son in me,
Bring the perfect nature in,
Now destroy the enmity,
Now consume the man of sin.

Verse 8
Adam, flesh, and self, and pride,
Antichrist, perdition’s son,
Let him not in me abide,
Cast him out, and reign alone;
Slay the dragon in the sea,
Make my soul thy pure abode,
Fill’d with all the deity,
Swallow’d up, and lost in God.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: "Genesis iii. 15." Introduced in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), published by John and Charles Wesley (London: William Strahan, 1742). Published in The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, Collected and Arranged by G. Osborn, Vol. 2 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1869), page 66.
Publishing: Public Domain