No tragedy behind it: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” was written about ordinary days

Many famous hymns come with a dramatic story: a shipwreck, a storm, a deathbed. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” does not.

Thomas Obadiah Chisholm, who wrote the words in 1923, said later that there was no special event behind it. He had been in poor health for much of his life and had worked in modest jobs. What moved him to write was the steady experience of God’s faithfulness day after day, in ordinary circumstances. That may be why the hymn has comforted so many people living ordinary lives.

Chisholm and Runyan

Chisholm was born in 1866 in a log cabin in Kentucky. He became a schoolteacher, a newspaper editor and, briefly, a Methodist minister before ill health forced him to stop. He later worked as an insurance agent and wrote more than a thousand poems, many of which became hymns.

He sent several poems to his friend William Runyan, a musician associated with the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Runyan wrote the tune for “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”, and the hymn was published in 1923.

From Lamentations

The hymn draws on Lamentations 3:22 to 23: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

Lamentations is one of the darkest books in the Bible, a series of poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem. In the middle of that grief, the writer remembers God’s faithfulness. The hymn carries that same idea: God’s mercy is renewed every morning, whatever the circumstances.

How it spread

The hymn spread slowly at first, then widely through the Moody Bible Institute and, later, through Billy Graham’s crusades, where George Beverly Shea sang it. It became one of the most loved hymns in the English-speaking world and has been translated into many languages. It is sung in churches across Ghana and Nigeria at thanksgiving services, weddings and funerals.

What the words say

The first verse describes God as unchanging: “There is no shadow of turning with Thee; Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not.” The second verse looks at creation: summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, sun, moon and stars all witness to God’s faithfulness. The third speaks of pardon, peace and God’s presence, “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow”.

The chorus is built on a simple confession: “Morning by morning new mercies I see; all I have needed Thy hand hath provided.”

A reflection

It is easy to notice God in a crisis. Chisholm’s hymn invites believers to notice God in routine: in daily bread, in health, in another morning. Try this week to write down, each morning, one thing you have been given for the day.

Chisholm lived to 94. He wrote that his life had been marked by frailty and modest means, and by the faithfulness he put into one hymn that the world still sings.