Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is ‘Safe in the hands of God’ by Michael Perry. The suggested tune is a Scottish one, ‘Bunillidh’, but John wrote his own.
It’s a setting of Psalm 27, one of the more positive psalms, and the first line of which, “The Lord is my light” (in Latin) is well known to any Oxford student as the University motto (see image above). Michael Perry rearranges the lines so that doesn’t appear at the start of this hymn. The themes of psalm and hymn are that God lights our path and acts as our salvation if we trust him and follow in his way.
‘Salvation’ here doesn’t mean particularly having our sins forgiven and becoming part of the Christian church, which is the more common Christian use of the term. In the sense used here, it refers more to offering protection, saving us from the harm caused by evil in ourselves or from other people, or making whole (the Latin ‘salus’ can also mean ‘health’).