253. Wonderful Grace of Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Haldor Lillenas, a young Nazarene pastor in Olivet, Illinois, wrote "Wonderful Grace of Jesus" in 1918 under decidedly modest circumstances. He and his wife had just bought a house and had almost nothing left over to furnish it — certainly not enough for a piano, despite the fact that both of them were hymn writers by calling. When Lillenas found a "wheezy little organ" for sale in a neighbor's home, he paid five dollars for it, and it was on that secondhand instrument that this hymn, among others, took shape.

In an irony Lillenas himself noted, the song was not published until 1922, four years later, in the Tabernacle Choir Book — and when the copyright changed hands, he sold it for five dollars, the exact price of the organ he had written it on.

The hymn is built almost entirely around a single word, stretched and stacked in every direction the refrain can reach: grace deeper than the sea, higher than the mountain, broader than transgression, sparkling like a fountain. Rather than developing an argument, it simply piles up comparison after comparison, each one straining to be adequate to the thing it is describing and each one, by the hymn's own logic, still falling short.

Lillenas went on to write more than 4,000 hymns and gospel songs over his lifetime and founded the Lillenas Publishing Company, a major force in twentieth-century evangelical music — a career whose most famous early product had begun on a five-dollar organ in a house with too little furniture.