One of the beauties of the nineteenth century gospel songs was their joining of a love for Jesus with a call to trust Him. The biblical gospel always points to the person and work of Jesus (who He is – the Son of God, and what He did – died on the cross to pay for our sin), and then to what sinners must do to receive what He offers (trust Him). And the typical nineteenth century gospel song joined those lyric themes with music that was both simple and singable. Simply Trusting Jesus Every Day is a fine example of both of those qualities.
The author of the lyrics was Edgar Page Stites, a direct descendant of John Howland, one of the Mayflower passengers, and cousin to another hymn-writer, Eliza Hewitt, who wrote More About Jesus Would I Know. He was born in 1836 in Cape May, New Jersey, where he lived for most of his life.
He lived for a brief time in Philadelphia during the Civil War, when he worked in the provisions department for the Union army, managing food distribution for transient soldiers. For a time he also served as a missionary to churches in South Dakota. Later he became a riverboat pilot on the Delaware River.
Stites was a lifelong Methodist, a member for 60 years of the First Methodist Church in Cape May. He was a regular attender at the famous Ocean Grove camp meetings further north along the shore, which continue to this day. He died in Cape May in 1921.
After he wrote this poem, it appeared in a newspaper, which came into the possession of famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Moody was impressed by it, and gave it to his song leader, Ira D. Sankey, asking him to set it to music. It was first published in Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos in 1878.
In his 1906 autobiography, Ira Sankey recalled the following about the comfort of the song:
About two years ago, writes a minister, “I visited a woman who was suffering from an incurable disease; but great as was her agony of body, her distress of mind was greater still. One day she said: ‘The future is so dark, I dare not look forward at all.’
“To my question, ‘Can’t you trust yourself in God’s hands?’ She replied: ‘No, I can’t leave myself there.’
I repeated the hymn, Simply trusting every day, and especially dwelt on the refrain, Trusting as the moments fly, trusting as the days go by. Ah, she said, I can trust him this moment; is it like that? I then sang the hymn to her, and the change that came over her was wonderful. She never lost this trust, and she had the page in her hymn-book turned down, that she might have the hymn read to her. After many months of intense suffering she passed away, simply trusting, to the land where there shall be no more pain.”
Ira David Sankey was born in 1840 in the village of Edinburg, Pennsylvania. He grew up on a farm in his childhood. In 1857 the family moved to Newcastle, Pennsylvania. It was in the local M. E. church that he began his first choir work. His voice soon began to attract attention and crowds of people came into the Sunday-school to hear the singing of this powerful baritone voice.
In 1860 he responded to the call of President Lincoln for volunteers and enlisted in the Twelfth Pennsylvania Regiment. While in the army he frequently led the singing in the religious services. When his term of service as a soldier expired, he returned home to assist his father as a collector of internal revenue.
In 1870 he was a delegate to the Y.M.C.A. Convention at Indianapolis, Indiana. Here he first met Dwight Moody. The singing had been rather poor, and Sankey was asked to lead. He began by singing the familiar hymn, There is a fountain filled with blood. The congregation joined heartily in the song which put new life into the meeting. At the close of the service, the singer was introduced to Mr. Moody. Mr. Sankey describes their meeting thus: “As I drew near Mr. Moody he stepped forward and taking me by the hand looked at me in that keen, piercing fashion of his as if reading my very soul. Then he said abruptly, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Pennsylvania,’ I replied. ‘Are you married?’ ‘I am.’ ‘How many children have you?’ ‘Two.’ ‘What is your business?’ ‘I am a government officer.’ ‘Well, you’ll have to give it up! I have been looking for you for the last eight years. You’ll have to come to Chicago and help me in my work.'”
Over the next decades he travelled with Moody as his song-leader and soloist, as they held large evangelistic rallies in arenas with popular gospel songs preceding the sermon. This combination was imitated by later evangelists like Billy Sunday with Homer Rodeheaver, as well as Billy Graham with George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows. The Moody / Sankey team spent two years in the British Isles, and returned there again several times, as well as going to the Holy Land.
They returned to America in 1875. Their first meeting after their return was held at Northfield, Massachusetts. Then followed meetings in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, and hundreds of other cities were visited, not only throughout the United States, but in Canada and Mexico, and great good was accomplished wherever they labored. Sankey was not only a great singer and his own best accompanist, but he proved to be a prolific composer, his original work being of a character that instantly commended itself to religious and popular audiences of the day. Sankey was one of the authors of the famous “Gospel Hymns” collections, and of various other hymnals.
The history of the famous hymn, The Ninety and Nine is note-worthy. While in Scotland Sankey found the poem in a newspaper which he was reading on a train. He clipped the poem from the paper and put it in his pocket. That very week Mr. Moody preached upon “The Prodigal Son.” At the conclusion of his discourse, he asked Sankey to sing something appropriate with which to close the service. “I had nothing suitable in mind,” writes Sankey, “but at that moment a voice seemed to say to me, ‘Sing the hymn you found on the train!’ I thought it impossible, but I placed the little slip on the organ in front of me, lifted my heart in prayer, and began to sing. Note by note the tune was given, and it has not been changed from that day to this.”
Sankey was a noble and generous man. Among his gifts he presented a handsome new building to the Y.M.C.A. at Newcastle, the town in which he had spent his boyhood. He spent the last few years of his life in blindness. He died at his residence at Brooklyn, N. Y., August 13, 1908.
Every true Christian knows that to be saved we must trust what Jesus did for us on the cross – paying the debt of our sin – rather than trusting in our own efforts to win God’s favor and earn a place for ourselves in heaven. But the entire Christian life, start to finish, is a life of trusting Him. It’s not something we do just as the first step in our repentance and faith. It’s the way we live every day. We trust Him to keep His promises not only to cleanse us from sin day by day, but also to lead us, protect us, use us, discipline us, cause us to grow, teach us, comfort us, counsel us, and preserve us all the way to heaven’s gate.
Stites’ hymn reflects that simple, in some ways childish, attitude of life-long trust, believing that we can count on the Lord to meet every need we face and to stay near us, even in those dark times when the eyes of faith can no longer see him.
- Simply trusting every day, trusting through a stormy way,
even when my faith is small, trusting Jesus, that is all.
Refrain:
Trusting as the moments fly, trusting as the days go by,
trusting Him whate’er befall, trusting Jesus, that is all. - Brightly doth His Spirit shine into this poor heart of mine;
while He leads I cannot fall, trusting Jesus, that is all. - Singing, if my way be clear, praying, if the path be drear,
if in danger for Him call, trusting Jesus, that is all. - Trusting Him while life shall last, trusting Him till earth be past,
till within the jasper wall, trusting Jesus, that is all.
Here’s a video to hear the hymn, sung by the University Choir from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), a Christian school in Ghana, West Africa.