Second Epistle to the Corinthians, "God's power is mighty in the weak" (), and from the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the Sower (). 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). The cantata falls relatively early in Bach's chronology of cantata compositions. It was possibly composed for 24 February 1715, but more likely a year or two earlier. The Bach scholar Christoph Wolff states: "The original performing material has survived and allows us to date the work to 1713". Bach performed the cantata again when he was Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1724, with an expanded scoring in a different key. It was then probably performed in the same service as the newly composed . Music Structure and scoring Bach structured the cantata in five movements, an instrumental sinfonia, a recitative, a recitative with chorale, an aria and a closing chorale. He scored the work, like other cantatas written in Weimar, for a small ensemble of three vocal soloists (soprano (S), tenor (T), bass (B)), a four-part choir only in the chorales, and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of four violas (Va), cello (Vc), bassoon (Fg) and basso continuo. The setting for four violas is unusual. In a similar orchestration, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 also omits violins. The second version of this cantata for a performance in Leipzig adds two recorders, which double viola I and II an octave higher. John Eliot Gardiner compares the effect to a four-foot stop on a pipe organ. The