I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story, because I know 'tis true;
It satisfies my longings as nothing else can do.
I love to tell the story, 'twill be my theme in glory,
To tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story; 'tis pleasant to repeat
What seems, each time I tell it, more wonderfully sweet.
I love to tell the story, for some have never heard
The message of salvation from God's own holy Word.
I love to tell the story; for those who know it best
Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.
And when, in scenes of glory, I sing the new, new song,
‘Twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.
Public domain hymn text (published 1866). Words by Katherine Hankey.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Katherine Hankey was an English woman born into a wealthy and well-established banking family who nonetheless became deeply and personally involved in hands-on Sunday school teaching and broader evangelical mission work specifically among young working-class women in London, at a time when such direct, personal involvement in charitable teaching work was somewhat unusual for a woman of her considerable social and financial standing, and she wrote this hymn's much longer original poem in 1866 while recovering at home from a serious illness that had forced her to rest and remain largely confined for an extended period of many months.
The original poem Hankey composed during that convalescence was actually conceived and written as a single long continuous work presented in two distinct parts, together titled 'The Old, Old Story,' and the shorter hymn as commonly sung in churches today draws only on a limited portion of Hankey's considerably fuller original poem — the second part specifically, titled 'The Story Told' — eventually set to music separately by William Howard Doane, an American composer, inventor, and successful manufacturer who also wrote original tunes for many other gospel hymns of the same general era, including several separate hymns by Fanny Crosby found elsewhere throughout this collection.
The first part of Hankey's original longer poem, titled 'The Story Wanted,' separately became the basis for a distinct companion hymn found elsewhere in this collection, 'Tell Me the Old, Old Story' (hymn 9), meaning both hymns actually emerged from the very same extended convalescent poem Hankey wrote during that single period of illness, though they were eventually set to different tunes by different composers and published independently of one another, sometimes years apart.
Hankey used a significant portion of the financial proceeds generated by her hymn writing, together with a considerable amount of her own substantial personal family wealth, to directly fund ongoing missionary and broader charitable work, including specific financial support for hospitals operating in Africa, and the hymn's own central governing idea — that the 'old, old story' of Jesus and His love never grows stale or tiresome no matter how many countless times it has already been retold to successive new listeners — reflects Hankey's own settled personal conviction, formed gradually over her many years of directly and repeatedly teaching the identical core gospel message to fresh new groups of young working-class women in London, that deliberate repetition of the essential Christian message was never actually tedious in itself, but instead remained, for both teacher and listener alike, a genuine and continually renewable source of spiritual freshness.
