314. Have You Any Room for Jesus?

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Have You Any Room for Jesus?" began as an anonymous text, first appearing in a hymnbook called Precious Words around 1870. Daniel W. Whittle adapted the words for inclusion in The Pearl, edited by J. M. Kieffer and published in Cleveland in 1871. The tune, titled ROOM FOR JESUS, was composed by Charlie C. Williams, and the finished hymn later reached a much wider audience through Gospel Hymns No. 3, edited by Ira Sankey and James McGranahan in 1878.

Whittle, a Civil War veteran who had lost an arm and undergone a profound conversion during his recovery, spent much of his later career adapting and shaping texts as well as writing his own under the pen name El Nathan. His touch on this anonymous hymn helped move it from a little-known hymnbook into the standard evangelistic repertoire of the Sankey era.

The hymn draws its central image directly from Luke 2:7, where Mary and Joseph find no room for the newborn Christ at the inn, and layers onto it the language of Revelation 3:20, where Christ stands knocking at the door. The combined image — a Savior who was once refused shelter now asking, again, to be let in — gives the hymn its double edge: a plea framed by history repeating itself, refusal answered by continued invitation.

Its structure, four short stanzas built around variations of the same question — is there room? — reflects its origin as a straightforward evangelistic tool: not a hymn of reflection so much as a direct appeal, meant to be sung at the exact moment a congregation was being asked to respond.