Of all of God’s attributes revealed in Scripture and proven over the centuries is that of God’s covenantal faithfulness. He makes wonderful promises to His people, for their good and for His glory. Where would you expect to turn to find the greatest confirmation of that in His inspired Word? We would immediately think of the many Psalms that give us words to express in praise our confidence in His trustworthiness, His guaranteed commitment to care for us with wisdom, love, and power. And of course we would find all that reflected in the hymnody of the church.
But wouldn’t you agree that the most impressive statement of that in Scripture comes in the book of Jeremiah’s Lamentations? In those five masterfully composed poetic chapters, the prophet writes in the midst of the terrible destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the brutal Babylonian army. As thousands died in the assault on the city, even the temple was destroyed. And yet in the midst of it, in chapter 3 the prophet was able to testify, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.”
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in Him.”The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
The hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” is obviously drawn from that powerfully encouraging passage. We should sing it not only when things are going well, but as in Jeremiah’s time so for us, when things are at their darkest and it is hardest to see that faithfulness. The hymn was written in 1923 by Thomas O. Chisholm (1866-1960) while he was living in Vineland, New Jersey, a community in the farmland of south Jersey, 50 miles south of Philadelphia not too far from the Delaware Bay. That touches a chord in my heart, since I was pastor of the Fairfield Presbyterian Church not far from Vineland from the mid-70’s to mid 80’s. While I was there, our congregation celebrated its 300th anniversary (organized in 1680), and continues in health today, testifying to the faithfulness of our covenant-keeping God.
A native of the small Kentucky town of Franklin, Thomas Obediah Chisholm was born in a log cabin. He lacked formal education. Nevertheless, he became a teacher at age sixteen and the associate editor of his hometown weekly newspaper, the Franklin Advocate, at age twenty-one. In 1893 Chisholm became a Christian through the ministry of Henry Clay Morrison, the founder of Asbury College and Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Morrison persuaded Chisholm to move to Louisville where he became editor of the Pentecostal Herald. Though he was ordained a Methodist minister in 1903, he served only a single, brief appointment at Scottsville, Kentucky, due to ill health. Chisholm relocated his family to Winona Lake, Indiana, to recover, and then to Vineland, New Jersey in 1916 where he sold insurance. He retired in 1953 and spent his remaining years in a Methodist retirement community in seaside Ocean Grove, New Jersey. By the time of his retirement, he had written more than 1200 poems, 800 of which were published. They often appeared in religious periodicals such as the Sunday School Times, Moody Monthly, and Alliance Weekly. Many of these were set to music.
Hymnologist Kenneth Osbeck provides the background for “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Chisholm had sent a number of his poems to the Rev. William H. Runyan (1870-1957), a musician with the Moody Bible Institute and one of the editors of Hope Publishing Company in Chicago. Runyan wrote of the hymn: “This particular poem held such an appeal that I prayed most earnestly that my tune might carry over its message in a worthy way, and the subsequent history of its use indicates that God answered prayer. It was written in Baldwin, Kansas, in 1923, and was first published in my private song pamphlets.” With Runyan’s tune name, FAITHFULNESS, George Beverly Shea (1909-2013), the famous Canadian-born singer of the Billy Graham Crusades, introduced this hymn to those attending the evangelistic meetings in Great Britain in 1954. It immediately became a favorite.
Runyan was planning to be at Moody Bible Institute’s Jubilee Anniversary of Founder’s Week in 1956. Three weeks earlier, five American missionaries had been martyred in Ecuador. The heartbreak hit close to home; all five were Wheaton College graduates and well known to the Moody students. In the days following the news, more than a few chapel services ended with a spontaneous institutional lament: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Then on the opening day of Founder’s Week, Life magazine ran a 10-page article about the murders, accompanied by a blazing headline: “Go Ye and Preach the Gospel: Five Do and Die.” During the ensuing week, the conference speakers found it hard to stay on topic. William Runyan’s song seemed to offer the best answer.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.
As it turns out, Runyan’s music itself was born in sadness, and came to popularity during a succession of difficult moments. Back in 1923, William Runyan found himself at a personal low point. After studying at Chicago’s Northwestern University and spending 10 years as a Methodist minister, he became a traveling evangelist. But preaching in the pre-microphone era took its toll. After 20 years, his voice was shot. Years later he recalled how he stepped to the pulpit one night and nothing came out, and that was it. Then he became progressively deaf, for which doctors told him there was no cure. For a while he tried a megaphone device that wrapped around his ears, a crazy gizmo straight from the Sears catalog, but not much helped. A Methodist governing board evaluated the situation and ruled him “non-effective,” the awkwardly named classification that granted him a modest disability pension. But the process exhausted Runyan, who bristled at the non-effective label. “My soul-saving campaigns resulted in more than 800 conversions” in the past year,” he wrote to a friend.
So Runyan turned to his other passion, his talent for editing, a job he could do with his limited hearing. He took a job with a denominational magazine, then started work on a hymnal project, putting out notices that he was interested in purchasing new song lyrics. Meanwhile, in Vineland, New Jersey, Thomas Chisholm caught wind of Runyan’s project and mailed him a stack of a dozen poems. They had never met, and later, neither could remember any special details about the song’s creation. No inspiring origin story here, which disappointed later researchers who uncovered a pretty boring story: Runyan sifted through a dozen of Chisholm’s poems, picked out his favorite, and wrote a tune. That was it.
Despite the humdrum beginning, Chisholm’s text drew the two men together in uncanny ways. Though separated by half a continent, both had suffered personal tragedies that felt remarkably similar. Chisholm was a news editor who suffered a breakdown after his mother’s death. (“Mr. Chisholm is mighty low,” his newspaper reported in 1890, not quite knowing what to call it.) He recovered enough to study for the ministry and became pastor of a Methodist church. But his health problems returned and he was forced to leave after only a year. Already in his 50s, having lost two careers because of ill health, he struggled to support his family. He started a business selling life insurance to pastors, and tried submitting poems to various magazines. Sure, he was “inspired,” but he also needed the money.
Runyan’s new career as editor and songwriter attracted the attention of Moody Bible Institute, who hired him in 1925 as editor for their publicity department. One of his jobs was to write the long-running “Moody Alumni” column in Moody Monthly magazine. And his second skill, hymnal editing, resulted in The Voice of Thanksgiving No. 4, which became Moody’s official chapel hymnal in 1928. Runyan included six of his own songs, including his personal favorite, the “Faithfulness Song” (both writers used this title in their private correspondence).
Which came first, the song, or the tragic moments that ensured its legacy? It’s hard to say, but it’s probably no coincidence that the song rose to prominence during the Great Depression. The stock market crash created great hardships in the student body, and also threw Chicago’s hymnal industry into a tailspin. Often strapped for cash, Runyan approached well-known publishers and offered to sell his favorite song. With no success. One publisher bought three other Runyan tunes for $10 each, but didn’t think the “Faithfulness Song” was worth the price. Not worth ten bucks! Worries piled on worries. “My deafness has become steadily more pronounced,” Runyan told a friend in 1930, concerned that the progression “must in time deprive me of any gainful occupation, unless the Good Father shall mercifully order it otherwise.”
The song story might have ended right there, but one man held a different opinion. In November 1934, when the Depression lingered at its lowest point, Dr. Will Houghton became Moody’s new president. He loved Runyan’s hymnal and loved the “Faithfulness Song”, believing it to be the right message for hard times.
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided.
“Great is Thy Faithfulness,” Lord unto me.
More bad news poured in, just a month after Houghton took office. Word came that two Moody alumni, John ’32 andBetty Stam ’31, had been beheaded by Communist soldiers in China. During the next few weeks, Houghton responded to the news of their martyrdom with chapel sermons and impromptu prayer services. According to his father, John Stam had claimed Lamentations 3 as a favorite Scripture passage, and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” was his favorite hymn. And now the song took on a life of its own. If Houghton forgot to call for it at the end of a service, students started singing it anyway, as a spontaneous benediction before returning to class.
Houghton promoted the song wherever he could. When he hired gospel soloist George Beverly Shea in 1938, he asked Shea to learn the song and feature it on WMBI, where it quickly became a listener favorite. A Moody radio ensemble made the first commercial recording in 1942, followed by many others. Later, as Shea began traveling with Billy Graham, the evangelistic team took the song on its 1954 tour to Great Britain, and from there it spread all over the world.
What kindles our emotional connections to the song? A good place to start is Chisholm’s text, which draws heavily from Lamentations 3:19–24. The prophet Jeremiah grieves over Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem, but concludes his litany of bad news with a famous hymn of praise. Chisholm added another quotation from James 1:17, “there is no variation due to a shadow of turning.”
Chisolm never intended his text to be a happy-time platitude, a frivolity to pull out at Thanksgiving time for the annual “count your blessings” service. No, he was acutely aware of the controversies of his own era; he was writing in the middle of a hymnal war. Some of the most famous revivalists had soared to popularity with song books full of shallow lyrics, songs about brightening the corner where you are and others like hearts wearing rainbows. Somewhere along the line, the gospel had disappeared from gospel songs. Chisholm wanted something different, a substantive song that would respond to his own despair, a testimony of the hope he had personally found in Jeremiah’s lament.
So while the church musicians argued over the merits of “objective” hymns vs. “subjective” gospel songs, Chisholm waded into the controversy by writing a song that stood squarely in the middle. He believed it was possible to combine elements of worship with elements of testimony, that both ideas could exist side-by-side. Of course this idea was not new. His example came straight from Scripture.
Lamentations 3 begins with a first-person testimony (“I am the man who has seen affliction”) and moves to an objective hymn of praise, expressed from a subjective point of view (“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in Him.”) Chisholm’s friends understood what he was trying to do. “His aim in writing is to magnify the Word, incorporating as much Scripture, either literally or in paraphrase, as possible,” Charles Gabriel once said. “And to avoid any flippant or sentimental themes, choosing subjects from the inexhaustible storehouse of the Bible.”
Runyan agreed, telling a reporter that “new gospel songs with true depth and meaning, songs that stick to the spiritual ribs, are one of the most apparent needs in the world today.” And ever the editor, Runyan obsessed over the punctuation of Chisholm’s poem. Early printed versions included his careful quotation marks around every repetition of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” reminding the congregation that they were singing the very words of Scripture. Runyan’s thoughtful ideas about church hymnody earned him another job. After a decade of rest, his speaking voice was returning, strong enough to host a 1939 Radio School of the Bible class on WMBI. He taught about his favorite hymn writers while students listened to the radio, filling out their exams.
However it might be analyzed, Chisholm and Runyan crafted a song that stands up to repeated singing, a song that reveals its truth over time as the singers meditate on its scriptural basis.
The three stanzas of the Faithfulness Song are bound together by a Hebrew word for love, khesed. Chisholm’s own King James Version translated this word as mercies: “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.” But mercies didn’t quite capture the depth of meaning. Other translators have suggested “steadfast love,” “faithful love,” and even “loyal love,” all of which emphasize the unchanging covenant of God. Maybe Miles Coverdale had it best, back in 1535, when he translated the Bible to modern English. No single word carried quite the right meaning, so Coverdale invented a new one: lovingkindness.
Chisholm’s own explanation of the word always started with a testimony: “My income has not been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years, which has followed me on until now. Although I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me wonderful displays of His providing care, for which I am filled with astonishing gratefulness.”
Like other aspects of God’s character, always difficult to put into words, lovingkindess could be demonstrated by human relationships. After all, the Old Testament uses the same Hebrew word to describe the relationship of Jacob to his son Joseph, the relationship of Ruth and Boaz, and even Rahab to the spies who visited her home. God helps us understand His lovingkindness by sending us people who model His love. And for anyone searching for an example of this David-and-Jonathan commitment, look no further than Runyan and Chisholm.
The two friends kept up a robust correspondence and would collaborate on 20 more songs, though none of these would eclipse “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” When interviewed, they often spoke about their abiding friendship and their admiration for the other. “We sensed affinity in spirit that linked us in spiritual fellowship from the beginning,” Runyan said. The friendship endured, no, blossomed, through Runyan’s increasing deafness and Chisholm’s increasing blindness. And for anyone passing through the struggles of life, their song offered a hefty dose of lovingkindness, straight from Lamentations 3, a fresh supply every morning. Late in life they made quite a pair. A writer who could not see, a composer who could not hear, two close friends who never saw each other.
Stanza 1 points us to God’s Word. We can count on what He has promised because He does not say one thing today and reverse course tomorrow. No shadow, no change, no failure. He will forever be the same. It’s called faithfulness, and He’s the expert at that! What He said to you today will still be true and dependable tomorrow. You can bank on it!
Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
there is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
as Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.
The repeated refrain takes us directly to Lamentations’ assurance that “morning by morning new mercies I see.” The longer we live, the more we will be able to testify that He indeed met all our needs, even in the most difficult times.
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
all I have needed Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Stanza 2 points us to the evidence of that faithfulness in nature as the changing seasons and the changing heavenly bodies “join with all nature in manifold witness” to His faithfulness. He promised from the very earliest chapters of Genesis that with all the dramatic changes around us, there will be a perpetual provision for our needs, if not today, then in the next seasonal cycle.
Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
join with all nature in manifold witness
to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love. [Refrain]
Stanza 3 points to God’s faithfulness in forgiving our sin, granting us the peace that passes understanding, promising never to leave us or forsake us, giving us strength and hope for today and tomorrow, and bringing tens of thousands of blessings into our lives. So yes, God’s faithfulness is truly one of the most wonderful dimensions of His character for which we should sing His praise in every prayer and every song.
Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide,
strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside! [Refrain]
Note: Copyright has expired and the hymn is now in the public domain.
The writer of one commentary on the hymn listed these five key benefits we count on every day from God’s faithfulness.
- God is faithful to forgive your sins when you confess them (1 Jn. 1:9).
- God is faithful not to allow you to be tempted beyond what you can bear (1 Cor. 10:13.)
- God is faithful to complete the work He began in you (Phil. 1:6).
- God is faithful to meet all your needs according to the riches of His grace (Phil. 4:19).
- God is faithful to go with you every step of the way (Isa. 40:28-31).
Here is a recording of a congregation enthusiastically singing the hymn in a British Cathedral with organ and brass orchestra (the congregation IS the choir!)
And you really MUST watch and listen to this glorious anthem arrangement of the hymn set as “Canticle of Faithfulness” by Daniel Bird, scored for choir and congregation with organ, brass and percussion. In this performance, the brass ensemble is joined by full orchestra. We have used this several times for festival services in churches which I’ve served, including Coral Ridge Presbyterian (Ft. Lauderdale, FL), Covenant Presbyterian (Steubenville, OH), and First Presbyterian (Schenectady, NY)..