For a long time this text was credited to Georg Michael Pfefferkorn, whose name was attached to it in a 1715 Naumburg hymnal, but hymnologists now assign it to Balthasar Kindermann (1636–1706), who had in fact published it decades earlier in his 1663 Das Buch der Redlichen. Kindermann placed it under the heading Verschmähung der Welt, “disdain for the world,” and shaped it after 1 John 2:15–17, prizing Jesus and His saving work far above anything the world can offer. Each of the original eight German stanzas ended with the same question, Was frag ich nach der Welt?, “What do I ask of the world?,” and the hymn’s whole answer is “Nothing.” Its final stanza piles up a string of names for Jesus on every believer’s behalf: “my treasure, my Life, my Wealth, my All, my Friend, my Love, my Pleasure, my heavenly happiness and bliss eternally.” Appointed as the Hymn of the Day for Trinity IX, it answers the Gospel’s warning against mammon by setting Christ Himself over against every empty promise of the world. The tune carries the same name as the text and first appeared in 1679 in a collection aptly titled “Heaven’s Desire, and World-Disgust”; our hymnal keeps four of the original eight stanzas.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026