Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.
Take my hands, and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love;
Take my feet, and let them be
Swift and beautiful for Thee.
Take my voice, and let me sing
Always, only, for my King;
Take my lips, and let them be
Filled with messages from Thee.
Public domain hymn text (published 1874). Words by Frances Ridley Havergal.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Frances Ridley Havergal was an English poet and hymn writer, the daughter of a clergyman and hymn composer himself, known throughout her life for an unusually intense and thoroughly wholehearted personal faith, often described by biographers and those who knew her personally as someone who approached even small, seemingly minor daily decisions — what to say in a conversation, how to spend a free afternoon, what to do with a small sum of unexpected money — as genuine opportunities for deliberate spiritual consecration to God, rather than treating such choices as neutral or purely practical matters.
She wrote this hymn's text in February 1874 during a five-day visit to a household in England where, as she noted afterward in her own private writing, ten separate people were present in the home over the course of her stay, and by the time she left at the end of those five days, all but two of them had experienced some form of genuine spiritual renewal, recommitment, or outright conversion during that same short visit — and even those remaining two, she recorded, seemed to be searching earnestly and sincerely by the time she departed, rather than remaining indifferent.
Deeply moved and unable to sleep on the final night of that visit, apparently overwhelmed by what she had witnessed happen among the household over such a short period, Havergal reportedly wrote out the entire hymn text in one sustained, uninterrupted burst of composition that same night, moving methodically and deliberately through a whole sequence of distinct areas of ordinary human life and capacity — hands, feet, voice, lips, silver and gold, intellect, will, and finally the heart itself — offering each one up individually, verse by verse, as a specific, itemized gift laid before God rather than treating consecration as one single vague, general gesture.
Havergal died relatively young, at only forty-two, in 1879, her health having been fragile for a significant portion of her adult life, yet her hymn of total, itemized consecration remains one of the most frequently sung hymns of Christian dedication and personal surrender in the English language, particularly popular even today at services of ministerial commissioning, missionary sending, and personal spiritual rededication, its verse-by-verse structure still used by many worshippers almost as a checklist for reflecting on which specific areas of their own lives remain fully offered to God and which do not.
