How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
“Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,
For I am thy God and will still give thee aid;
I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.”
When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.
The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no, never, no never forsake!
Public domain hymn text (published 1787). Words by "K" in Rippon's Selection of Hymns.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn was first published anonymously in 1787, credited only to the single initial 'K,' inside a large hymnal compiled by the English Baptist minister John Rippon, who spent years gathering hundreds of hymn texts from a wide range of contributors, both well-known and obscure, into what became one of the most widely used and influential Baptist hymnals of its era, reprinted in dozens of editions on both sides of the Atlantic.
The true identity behind the initial 'K' has never been conclusively established, despite considerable effort by generations of hymnologists over the past two centuries to track it down. Several candidates have been proposed over the years — including a minister named Robert Keene, who is independently known to have contributed other material to Rippon's collection and whose surname would plausibly explain the initial — but no single attribution has ever achieved full scholarly consensus, and the author of one of the most enduring and theologically weighty hymns of Christian assurance in the English language remains, in a fairly literal and permanent sense, anonymous.
The hymn's structure is unusual among well-known hymns of any era: after a single introductory stanza addressed conventionally to the reader, the remaining verses shift abruptly and are presented as though spoken directly by God Himself, in the first person — 'fear not, I am with thee,' 'I will strengthen thee, help thee' — closely paraphrasing and weaving together specific promises scattered throughout Scripture, particularly from Isaiah 41 and 43. This distinctive first-person divine voice gives the hymn a tone of direct, immediate reassurance quite different from the more typical pattern of human praise or petition addressed upward to God.
Because of that unusual structure and its unmatched density of scriptural promise packed into a handful of verses, the hymn has long been particularly prized in seasons of severe hardship and crisis — reportedly a favorite of figures ranging from Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who is said to have called for it on his deathbed, to countless ordinary believers navigating illness, war, and loss over more than two centuries, all singing words whose original human author never claimed credit for writing them.
