My Life Must Be Christ’s Broken Bread

Heather Allington

Heather writes for Sunday Song Book on behalf of the The Salvation Army Oshawa. As a lifelong member of the Army, she has loved these familiar - and some less familiar - songs for many years, and enjoys researching and writing about their origins. She is a wife, mother, grandmother and retired elementary school teacher who likes trying her hand at watercolour painting and poetry writing.

My life must be Christ’s broken bread,
My love His outpoured wine;
A cup o’erfilled, a table spread
Beneath His name and sign,
That other souls, refreshed and fed,
May share His life through mine.

My all is in the Master’s hands
For Him to bless and break;
Beyond the brook His winepress stands,
And thence my way I take,
Resolved the whole of love’s demands
To give for His dear sake.

Lord, let me share that grace of Thine
Wherewith Thou didst sustain
The burden of the fruitful vine,
The gift of buried grain.
Who dies with Thee, O Word divine,
Shall rise and live again.

Albert Orsborn, sometimes called the Salvation Army’s “Poet General”, wrote this song at Eastertime in 1947. He was leading a series of meetings in Germany and Holland, and felt dismayed at the problems and rifts that had been caused by World War ll. He said, “I cried to God… to bring us together, to bridge what seemed to be, in all reason, an impassable gulf between our respective conditions of living… God revealed to me that we have no hope of being a blessing to other souls unless our lives become part of the Saviour’s consecration.”

“I cried to God… to bring us together, to bridge what seemed to be, in all reason, an impassable gulf between our respective conditions of living… Share on X

Some Salvationists consider the ideas expressed in this hymn to be their way of experiencing and then living out the sacrament of what some other churches term “The Lord’s Supper”, or “Holy Communion”. The song was published first in The War Cry of May 3, 1947 and has been in S.A. Song Books since at least 1953.