Lyrics
Begone, unbelief, my Savior is near,
And for my relief will surely appear;
By prayer let me wrestle, and He will perform,
With Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm.
Though dark be my way, since He is my Guide,
‘Tis mine to obey, ’tis His to provide;
Though cisterns be broken, and creatures all fail,
The word He hath spoken shall surely prevail.
His love in time past forbids me to think
He’ll leave me at last in trouble to sink;
Each sweet Ebenezer I have in review
Confirms His good pleasure to help me quite through.
Determined to save, He watched o’er my path,
When Satan’s blind slave, I sported with death;
And can He have taught me to trust in His name,
And thus far have brought me, to put me to shame?
Why should I complain of want or distress,
Temptation or pain? He told me no less:
The heirs of salvation, I know from His word,
Through much tribulation must follow their Lord.
How bitter that cup, no heart can conceive,
Which He drank quite up, that sinners might live!
His way as much rougher, and darker than mine;
Did Jesus thus suffer, and shall I repine?
Since all that I meet shall work for my good,
The bitter is sweet, the medicine is food;
Though painful at present, ’twill cease before long,
And then, O! how pleasant, the conqueror’s song!
Public domain hymn text (1779). Words by John Newton.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Newton wrote this hymn’s text for the 1779 ‘Olney Hymns’ collection — the same joint hymnal project with William Cowper already discussed extensively elsewhere in this collection.
Its central image of Christ present ‘in the vessel’ during a storm draws directly on Mark 4:35-41, the Gospel account of Jesus calming a violent storm on the Sea of Galilee, while His disciples, terrified, wake Him from sleep in the boat.
Newton had his own extensive personal history as a sailor and later a ship’s captain, discussed at length elsewhere in this collection in connection with ‘Amazing Grace’ — including his own vivid firsthand memory of the violent 1748 Atlantic storm that marked the beginning of his conversion.
Given that, this hymn’s nautical imagery of storms and vessels carries a considerably more literal, lived weight, coming from Newton, than it would from a hymn writer without his own extensive seafaring background.
The hymn’s second verse image of ‘cisterns broken’ draws on Jeremiah 2:13, in which God rebukes Israel for abandoning Him, ‘the fountain of living waters,’ in favor of man-made cisterns ‘that can hold no water.’
Newton applied the prophet’s ancient warning about misplaced trust in unreliable human resources to the ordinary spiritual temptation of trusting anything other than God’s own unfailing provision.
The hymn’s confident, almost defiant opening command is addressed not to God but directly to ‘unbelief’ itself, ordered to ‘begone.’ That reflects a hymn genre Newton used more than once, treating doubt and unbelief as an intruding presence to be actively, verbally commanded away, rather than passively endured.
Newton had spent years of his own earlier life in genuine unbelief before his conversion. He apparently found it necessary to practice this as an active verbal exercise, rather than simply hoping it would resolve itself.
