‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word;
Just to rest upon His promise;
Just to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”
Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him!
How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er!
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus!
O for grace to trust Him more!
O how sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to trust His cleansing blood;
Just in simple faith to plunge me
‘Neath the healing, cleansing flood!
Yes, ’tis sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just from sin and self to cease;
Just from Jesus simply taking
Life and rest, and joy and peace.
Public domain hymn text (1882). Words by Louisa M. R. Stead.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Louisa M. R. Stead was an English-born hymn writer who emigrated to the United States as a young woman and later served for a period as a missionary in South Africa, and she wrote this hymn's text in 1882 during a period of profound personal grief, not long after witnessing her husband drown while attempting to save a young boy who had gotten into difficulty while swimming, an incident Stead herself witnessed helplessly from the shore alongside their young daughter.
Stead was left, in the aftermath of that sudden loss, to raise her daughter alone and in genuinely difficult financial circumstances, and hymnologists studying the hymn's origins generally read its repeated, deliberately simple insistence on trusting Christ 'just' to take Him at His word, without additional evidence or explanation, as directly reflecting the stark, unadorned kind of faith Stead found herself needing to practice in the immediate aftermath of her husband's sudden and traumatic death, rather than as an abstract theological statement composed at a comfortable emotional distance from genuine loss.
Despite this deeply difficult personal background, Stead went on, a number of years later, to serve as a missionary in South Africa for an extended period, continuing active Christian ministry despite the considerable personal loss and hardship that had originally shaped this, her single best-known hymn.
William J. Kirkpatrick, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as composer of the tune to Fanny Crosby's 'Redeemed, How I Love to Proclaim It' (hymn 85), composed the tune paired with Stead's words, and the hymn's simple, repeated insistence on trust without demanding further proof or explanation has made it a particularly favored hymn among believers navigating their own seasons of grief or unexplained hardship, sung by congregations who, like Stead herself, have found themselves needing to trust specifically without first being given a satisfying explanation for their own suffering.
