Search Me, O God

May 5, 2018 (Saturday)
The hymn for today’s blog was written by James Edwin Orr, who was born in 1912 in Belfast in northern Ireland, of American-British parentage. He studied at the College of Technology, Belfast. In 1930 or 1931, after spending some years as a baker, Orr began evangelizing, not only in Britain but also elsewhere in Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa.
After their marriage in 1937, he and Mrs. Orr evangelized in Australia (1939) China, Canada and the United States of America. He completed college and seminary in the United States and during World War II he served as chaplain in the US Air Force in the Pacific. After the war he earned his PhD at Oxford.
In 1949 he and his wife made the United States their permanent base, while continuing to travel the world promoting church revival and renewal. They eventually traveled to 150 countries.
In 1966 or 1967 Orr became a Professor at the School of World Missions, in Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He remained a professor there until 1981, and a professor emeritus thereafter. Of him Billy Graham wrote, “Dr. J. Edwin Orr, in my opinion, is one of the greatest authorities on the history of religious revivals in the Protestant world. He wrote numerous books–many of them histories of evangelical revivals–and authored a number of hymns.
The hymn for today is “Cleanse Me,” now commonly known as, “Search Me, O God.”