Bach wrote the cantata for the
17th Sunday after Trinity. The prescribed readings for the Sunday were from the
Epistle to the Ephesians, the admonition to keep the unity of the Spirit (), and from the
Gospel of Luke,
healing a man with dropsy on the Sabbath (). The cantata text refers not to the healing, but to the honour due to God on the Sabbath. The words for the opening chorus are from
Psalm 29 (). The lyrics of the cantata are based on a poem in six verses of
Picander, "", published in 1725 in his first spiritual book . The Bach scholar
Alfred Dürr has nevertheless reason to date the cantata in 1723 already, suggesting that the cantata text may have preceded the poem, but there is no certain evidence that the cantata was not composed some years later. The first recitative describes the desire for God as expressed in
Psalm 42 (), "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." Only the melody of the closing
chorale "" (Lübeck, 1603) is known. Some musicologists including
Werner Neumann suggested the words of the fifth verse of that chorale, others such as
Philipp Spitta and the edition of the
Bach Gesellschaft preferred the final verse of
Johann Heermann's hymn "" (1630) which was sung to the same melody in Leipzig. == Scoring and structure ==