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"Joy to the World" stands as North America's most-published Christmas carol, yet few who sing it know the remarkable story behind it—or that Isaac Watts never intended it for Christmas at all.
The story behind this carol runs deeper than its holiday familiarity suggests. It's a story about a mother on prison steps, a protégé mastering Latin by age five, a body overtaken by debilitating illness, a heart distraught over lifeless, Christless worship, and a psalm calling for "new song." To understand this hymn is to discover a man whose pain was transformed into songs that would reshape Christian worship for centuries.
So, how did Watts' life of suffering produce such a powerful and enduring song of joy?
Prison Steps
Picture Southampton, England, 1674. A young mother sits on cold prison steps in November, nursing her premature infant son against her chest. Inside those walls sits her husband—Isaac Watts Sr.—imprisoned for no crime except worshiping Jesus according to his conscience rather than the king's command.
This was Isaac's introduction to the world. Cold stone. Separation. The price of faithfulness. That premature start would mark him for life—his body always fragile, perpetually underdeveloped, as though he could never quite inhabit the strength other children grew into.
When Isaac was nine years old, he watched once more as authorities came and took his father from him. Isaac later called it one of the "memorable affairs of my life"[1]—such careful, restrained language for a wound that would shape the next two and a half years of a boy's life, years when a father's presence matters most.
Eventually letters came from London, "You have a father that loves you," Isaac Watts Sr. wrote to his son, "Though I cannot speak to you, yet I pray for you; and do hope that my God will hear me, and, in due time, bring me to live again amongst you."[2] While other boys ran freely through Southampton's streets, laughed without looking over their shoulders, young Isaac learned what it costs to stand for truth. He learned what exile looks like.
His father could have conformed—could have simply attended the king's church, kept his convictions private, chosen safety over truth. But he didn't.
That watching did something to Isaac. It taught him that what's visible matters. That hidden truth serves no one. That worship which keeps Christ in shadows—no matter how ancient or acceptable—betrays the very One it claims to honor.
The Refusal
Isaac's mind blazed despite his frail body. Latin at five. Greek, Hebrew, and French by his teenage years. His intellectual gifts became so renowned that at sixteen a Southampton physician offered to fund his education at Oxford or Cambridge—the golden ticket, the respectable path, doors swinging wide open.
And Isaac refused.
Accepting the offer would have required him to renounce his dissenting faith, so he chose Stoke Newington's Dissenting Academy instead, "determined to take his lot among the dissenters."[3] He chose exile with the marginalized over respectability with the establishment. He chose conscience over comfort, community over status.
The irony is striking: his book, Logic, would become the standard textbook at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale for over a century. The institutions that barred his convictions taught his book for generations. His exile bore fruit in the very places that excluded him.
But exile wasn't the hardest part. His body—already fragile from that premature start—couldn't sustain pastoral ministry. Debilitating illness forced him from the pulpit in 1712. Later came a stroke. Partial paralysis. The inability to write. For someone whose entire calling centered on speaking truth, being silenced must have felt like a final cruelty.
Except he wasn't silenced at all.
When You Can't Preach, You Sing
Unable to preach from a pulpit, Watts channeled his pastoral heart into something that would reach far more: he transformed how the church worships.
He was disturbed by something broken. Every Sunday, congregations dutifully sang metrical psalms while Christ remained "hidden in shadows." They sang about David's personal circumstances, about animal sacrifices and ancient ceremonies, while the Savior who fulfilled it all went unmentioned.
This wouldn't do. Not for Watts. "The very power of singing was given to human nature chiefly for this purpose," he wrote, "that our own warmest affections of soul might break out into natural or divine melody."[4]
Warmest affections. Not cold duty. Not mechanical recitation. But hearts breaking open into melody because they've encountered Someone too wonderful to contain in silence.
So Watts did something revolutionary. He took the psalms and translated them not word-for-word, but truth-for-truth, engaging with them in light of Christ's coming. He imagined what David would have written "if he had lived in our Day," with the full revelation of Christ before him. His goal? To strip away "their veil of darkness" so that Christ would "appear in 'em to all that sing."[5]
He called this method "imitation" rather than translation. Where the psalmist could only hint and prophesy, Watts directed congregations to Jesus—His cross, His resurrection, His reign.
Watts' pastoral heart wouldn't settle for technically correct worship that left hearts cold. He wanted every person—not just scholars, not just clergy, but every heart—to encounter Jesus personally. This moved him to turn Psalm 98 into "Joy to the World."
Singing a New Song
The psalm itself opens by calling for a new song: "Sing to the LORD a new song! For He has done marvelous things. His right hand and His Holy arm have worked salvation for Him" (Psalm 98:1, NIV).
These phrases like "marvelous things," "right hand," "holy arm" are taken from the Exodus event, recalling how God parted seas and toppled Pharaoh's armies to deliver His people. Though instead of simply remembering this past event, the psalm goes on to hint at something far greater, something that would reach all nations this time and stir joy within creation itself.
Rather than dreading the closing focus on the Lord coming to judge the earth, we see people from every nation celebrating it as their own deliverance. The psalm raises many questions and tensions that only make sense after the cross.
This is what Watts sought to clarify. The psalm was reaching toward something it couldn't yet name, toward a Judge whose judgment would become the nations’ salvation, restoring even creation itself. Watts saw what lay hidden in the shadows of this psalm. He saw Jesus.
And so, he sang the new song the psalm had been waiting for.
Joy to the world; the Lord is come;
Let Earth receive her King;
Let ev'ry heart prepare him room,
And heav'n and nature sing.
Joy to the Earth, the Savior reigns;
Our mortal songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,
Repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love.
The Lord is Come
This is what Watts had been working toward his entire life: making Christ visible where the psalms could only gesture forward in hope.
For Watts this wasn't just theological puzzle-solving, the connecting of prophetic dots. It was the overflow of a heart that had personally "proved [experienced for himself] the glories of His righteousness and the wonders of His love." The song he couldn't help but sing.
The Judge that Psalm 98 foretold has arrived—and He arrived as our Savior. This is what creation itself was waiting to celebrate. Why rivers would clap. Why mountains would sing. Why nations would shout for joy at the sound of judgment.
Because this Judge didn't first come to administer judgment—He came to absorb it. He came as a King to be crowned with the thorns of our curse. He came to make sins and sorrows cease.
Far from the earthly kings Watts lived under—the ones who unjustly imprisoned his father—Watts celebrates a King who "rules the world with truth and grace." A King whose glory all nations experience in righteousness and love.
Far as the Curse Is Found
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
Since Genesis 3, the curse has been our reality. We feel it in the frailty of our bones. Toil under it in the futility of our hands. Labor through its birth pangs. Grieve it at gravesides. Wrestle with it in the rotting selfishness of our own hearts.
This is all we know. This is the curse we live. This is why Jesus came: to restore what sin has ruined.
And this is why Watts was so moved to sing:
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
For a man plagued by the curse—a father taken from him, lifelong illness, a debilitating stroke—these words were not denial or cheap facade. They were the celebration of the curse's defeat. A defiant proclamation that his Savior reigns and will one day return.
The curse's days are numbered. Its undoing is certain.
This is possibly Watts' most theologically developed addition. It has no parallel in Psalm 98, other than the unexplained cosmic rejoicing. Reflecting on passages like Genesis 3 and Romans 8, Watts sought to give voice to the grounds for such joy. He sought to reawaken our hearts to the far-reaching scope of what Jesus has accomplished and the hope that is ours as His people.
Wherever we live with the pains of the curse today, His blessings will flow tomorrow.
What a reason for joy. Redemption as wide as ruin. Grace as far-reaching as the fall.
Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room
Joy to the world; the Lord is come;
Let Earth receive her King;
Let ev'ry heart prepare him room,
And heav'n and nature sing.
But Watts doesn't just leave it at the cosmic level. His pastoral heart urges us from the first stanza to make this personal.
The outflow of God's cosmic blessings starts in human hearts. Will you prepare Him room?
In your longing for God to restore this world held captive by sin's curse, will you let Him start in your own heart? Will you let His blessing begin to flow there—far as the curse is found?
This is not cleaning up your own act. It's clearing out room for Him to reside, reign, and renew.
It is experiencing the wonders of Christ's love and the glories of His righteousness—His making all things right again—that fuels our surrender. That makes us joyfully say, "Here am I, start with me."
The more we grasp of who Jesus is and what He has done, the more of our hearts we long to give Him.
May this Advent be a season for you to experience for yourself “the glories of His righteousness, and wonders of His love." May it grip you so deeply that your heart repeats sounding joy: "The Lord is come!"
Endnotes
- https://www.hoap.co.uk/isaac_watts_and_his_family.pdf; see page 11.↑
- I found this to be a moving letter. Worth a read if you have a few minutes. https://www.wholesomewords.org/family/wattstochld.html ↑
- https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/articles/2025/isaac-watts-the-man-behind-the-hymns/ ↑
- Isaac Watts, preface to The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (London: J. Clark, R. Ford, and R. Cruttenden, 1719), page xvi. You can read it here: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/ccel/eee/files/wattspre.htm ↑
- All these quotes are also from Isaac Watts’ preface to The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament which you can read here: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/ccel/eee/files/wattspre.htm↑
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