Lyrics
In loving kindness Jesus came,
My soul in mercy to reclaim,
And from the depths of sin and shame,
Through grace He lifted me.
From sinking sand He lifted me,
With tender hand He lifted me,
From shades of night to plains of light,
O praise His name, He lifted me!
He called me long before I heard,
Before my sinful heart was stirred,
But when I took Him at His word,
Forgiv'n He lifted me.
His brow was pierced with crown of thorn,
His hands by cruel nails were torn,
When from my guilt and grief, forlorn,
In love He lifted me.
Now on a higher plane I dwell,
And with my soul I know 'tis well;
Yet how or why, I cannot tell,
He should have lifted me.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1905).
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles H. Gabriel wrote both the words and music of "In Loving-Kindness Jesus Came" in 1905, though it is probably better known today by its refrain-derived title, "He Lifted Me." The hymn is one of thousands Gabriel produced over a career that made him, by the assessment of many of his contemporaries, the most popular and prolific gospel-song writer of the early twentieth century.
The hymn's structure carries a single image — being lifted — through four stanzas that trace the shape of a conversion narrative: a soul reclaimed from shame, a call heard before it was understood, a rescue costly to the One doing the rescuing, and finally a settled, still slightly bewildered gratitude in the closing verse, where the speaker admits plainly that they cannot fully explain why they were the one lifted.
That final stanza's frank uncertainty — "yet how or why, I cannot tell, He should have lifted me" — gives the hymn an unusual honesty for its genre. Rather than closing on triumphant certainty, it ends on the same note of quiet astonishment that runs through the whole text: not an argument for why the rescue makes sense, but a plain acknowledgment that it does not need to, in order to be real.
Gabriel's tune for the refrain, built around the repeated phrase "He lifted me," became durable enough on its own that hymnals across many traditions — Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and Salvation Army collections among them — have carried the hymn under that shorter title for more than a century since Gabriel first wrote it.
