51. Standing on the Promises

The Story Behind the Hymn

Russell Kelso Carter was an American educator, engineer, and hymn writer who taught mathematics, science, and later civil engineering at the Pennsylvania Military College (now Widener University) in Chester, Pennsylvania, during and after the American Civil War era, an academic career that stood in notable contrast to the very different religious ministry he would eventually become associated with later in his life. He was also, remarkably, a trained physician, and later still spent time as a professional cowboy and even a novelist writing Western fiction — a genuinely unusual and varied résumé for a nineteenth-century hymn writer.

He became closely associated in his later career with the divine healing movement, a distinct strand of nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity, closely tied to the broader holiness movement, that emphasized physical healing through prayer and sustained faith as an entirely ordinary, expected part of everyday Christian life rather than as an unusual or exceptional occurrence.

Carter reportedly struggled for years with a serious heart ailment that physicians of the period considered essentially untreatable by the medical standards of the day, and he credited his own eventual, unexpected recovery primarily to sustained prayer and personal faith rather than to any conventional medical treatment he had received — a formative personal experience that shaped a considerable portion of his later ministry, writing, and public speaking on the specific subject of divine healing for the remainder of his life.

He wrote both the words and the original music of this hymn entirely himself, and its central, repeated image — standing firmly and without wavering on the specific, itemized promises God has made throughout Scripture — reflected the confident, deliberately assertive style of faith characteristic of the broader divine healing movement Carter had become part of. The hymn is notably less about pleading uncertainly with God for something not yet given, and considerably more about confidently and repeatedly claiming, verse after verse, something the singer already firmly believed had already been promised and guaranteed in the biblical text itself.