Lyrics
Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thy own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!
Public domain hymn text (1923). Words by Thomas O. Chisholm.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Thomas Obadiah Chisholm was a Methodist minister from rural Kentucky whose health forced him out of active pastoral ministry after only a single year, leaving him to spend most of his working life as a life insurance agent in Ohio rather than in any pulpit.
He wrote poetry quietly on the side throughout his life, eventually producing well over a thousand poems, and in 1923 he mailed a small batch of them to his friend William M. Runyan, a composer and editor at Hope Publishing Company, asking whether any seemed worth setting to music.
Chisholm was explicit that the hymn did not come from any singular crisis or dramatic turning point in his life. He described it instead as a response to his own ordinary, day-by-day experience of God's provision, writing that he simply wanted to fix in words 'a vivid sense of these things' before they slipped from memory.
The text leans directly on Lamentations 3:22-23, which speaks of God's mercies being 'new every morning,' and Chisholm builds the entire hymn around that single, unhurried idea rather than around any grand theological argument.
Runyan set the words to a broad, steady tune he called FAITHFULNESS and later wrote that composing it felt like 'a distinct spiritual experience,' adding that the process left him feeling he ought to approach the manuscript on his knees rather than at his writing desk.
The hymn only gained wide popularity after Billy Graham's evangelistic crusades adopted it as a signature song decades after it was written, exposing it to audiences far larger than Chisholm, who lived simply and modestly throughout his life, likely ever anticipated.
Chisholm continued writing hymns and poems into his eighties, and by his own account never considered this one his most skillfully crafted work. Its lasting appeal seems to rest less on literary ambition than on the plainness of its central claim: that faithfulness so constant it renews itself every morning is worth noticing, and worth naming.
