The cantata is based on a text by Erdmann Neumeister, a pioneer of the use of a format using recitative and aria, which was new in religious music. This text was written for the Eisenach court and published in Gotha in 1711 in the collection (Sacred singing and playing), which had been set to music by Georg Philipp Telemann. It is one of few texts set to music in Weimar which were not written not by the court poet Salomon Franck. The text cites Isaiah in the second movement, "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, … So shall my word be ..." (), related to the Gospel about God's word compared to seed. In the third movement, the poet combines warnings of the dangers to God's word in the style of a sermon with four lines of prayer from a litany by Martin Luther. The closing chorale is the eighth stanza of Lazarus Spengler's hymn "" (1524).