103. Take Time to Be Holy

The Story Behind the Hymn

William D. Longstaff, an English businessman who deliberately used a substantial portion of his own considerable personal wealth to support a range of active evangelistic and missionary causes throughout his life, wrote this hymn's text in 1882, reportedly composing it shortly after hearing a sermon that had taken the specific biblical phrase 'be ye holy' as its central organizing theme.

Unlike a number of the other hymn writers represented elsewhere throughout this same collection, many of whom were formally ordained ministers by profession, Longstaff himself remained a private layperson throughout his entire life, continuing to work actively in business while simultaneously devoting significant amounts of both his personal time and his own considerable financial resources to actively supporting major evangelistic campaigns of his era, including specifically those associated with the visiting American evangelists D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey during their extended preaching visits to England.

The hymn's own notably practical, almost directly instructional overall tone — urging specific, concrete daily spiritual habits such as regular prayer, consistent Bible reading, and active ongoing Christian fellowship, rather than attempting to describe any single dramatic or extraordinary spiritual experience — directly reflects its own origins in an entirely ordinary act of ongoing weekly sermon-going, and clearly reflects its intended audience of everyday, ordinary churchgoers going about their regular daily lives, rather than functioning as any kind of elaborate personal testimony describing crisis, conversion, or dramatic inner transformation of the kind found in several other hymns throughout this collection.