I am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me;
But I long to rise in the arms of faith,
And be closer drawn to Thee.
Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,
To the cross where Thou hast died;
Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,
To Thy precious, bleeding side.
Consecrate me now to Thy service, Lord,
By the power of grace divine;
Let my soul look up with a steadfast hope,
And my will be lost in Thine.
O the pure delight of a single hour
That before Thy throne I spend,
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend!
There are depths of love that I cannot know
Till I cross the narrow sea;
There are heights of joy that I may not reach
Till I rest in peace with Thee.
Public domain hymn text (published 1875). Words by Fanny J. Crosby.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Judson Van DeVenter was a public-school art teacher and district supervisor working in Pennsylvania, a career in which he had achieved genuine professional success and financial security, when he began to feel a persistent, recurring call toward full-time evangelistic ministry that continued, by his own later account, for roughly five full years without resolution, during which time he found himself genuinely torn between the comfortable security and hard-won professional success he already possessed as an established art teacher and supervisor, and what he increasingly believed, with mounting inner conviction over those same five years, God was specifically asking him to give up in order to pursue instead.
Van DeVenter later described the eventual moment of his final decision in strikingly explicit musical and artistic terms, terms that drew directly on his own professional background as a trained visual artist: he described a great, sustained inward struggle within his soul during which, as he put it in his own words, God 'washed some of the acids out of my life' — acids that had apparently been corroding both his artistic and spiritual sensibilities during the long years of internal resistance — and 'gave me back the joy of making melody' specifically at the exact moment he finally, fully surrendered his own carefully laid personal and professional plans in favor of whatever God was calling him toward instead.
He gave up his established, financially secure teaching career entirely at that decisive point and spent the remainder of his working life instead as a traveling evangelist and gospel singer, a considerably less financially secure and more physically demanding vocation than the comfortable teaching position he had voluntarily walked away from at the height of his professional success.
He wrote this hymn directly about that specific personal experience of surrender, and it went on to become closely and permanently associated with the public altar calls held at the close of the era's large evangelistic revival meetings, commonly sung as a quiet, deeply personal decision-hymn specifically while individual members of the congregation were coming forward publicly to make their own decisions of faith at the front of the meeting hall — its simple, endlessly repeated central line, 'all to Jesus I surrender,' becoming something close to a recognized cultural shorthand for the entire lived experience of evangelical religious conversion throughout early twentieth-century American revivalism.
