My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
His oath, His covenant, His blood,
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
When He shall come with trumpet sound,
O may I then in Him be found;
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
Public domain hymn text (published 1834). Words by Edward Mote.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Edward Mote was a London cabinetmaker by trade, spending the great majority of his working life as a skilled furniture builder rather than as a professional clergyman, and he wrote hymns purely as an amateur pursuit alongside his primary cabinetmaking career for decades, only formally entering ordained pastoral ministry considerably later in his life, in his fifties, when he finally became a Baptist minister serving a congregation in Kent, England, after several full decades already spent building furniture by hand for a living.
Mote later described writing this hymn's now-famous chorus — 'On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand' — in a fairly spontaneous, largely unplanned manner one ordinary Monday morning while walking to his regular cabinetmaking job, drawing the central image directly from Matthew 7:24-27, Jesus's well-known parable contrasting a wise man who builds his house on solid rock against a foolish man who instead builds an equivalent house on shifting, ultimately unstable sand. Mote reportedly composed and wrote out the remaining additional verses needed to complete the full hymn only over the several days immediately following that initial spontaneous Monday-morning chorus, working on it gradually alongside his ordinary daily cabinetmaking work rather than in one single continuous sitting.
He later recounted, in his own later written recollections, a specific pastoral visit he made to a dying woman within his congregation who had, at that particular moment, no hymnbook readily available and no remaining physical strength or ability left to sing conventionally to comfort herself during her final days of life; Mote personally wrote out the still-developing verses of this hymn by hand for her benefit during that visit, reciting or reading them to her directly as a source of comfort in place of actual congregational singing.
That specific pastoral encounter reportedly confirmed for Mote, in a way his own earlier, largely accidental Monday-morning composition of the chorus alone had not yet fully done, the genuine practical and pastoral usefulness of the hymn he had almost written entirely by unplanned accident on an ordinary commute to his cabinetmaking job, a realization that directly prompted him to have the completed hymn formally printed and considerably more widely distributed to other congregations not long afterward.
