Lyrics
My Jesus, as Thou wilt! Oh, may Thy will be mine!
Into Thy hand of love I would my all resign;
Through sorrow, or through joy, conduct me as Thine own,
And help me still to say, "My Lord, Thy will be done."
My Jesus, as Thou wilt! If needy here and poor,
Give me Thy people's bread, their portion rich and sure;
The manna of Thy Word let my soul feed upon;
And if all else should fail, my Lord, Thy will be done.
My Jesus, as Thou wilt! Though seen through many a tear,
Let not my star of hope grow dim or disappear;
Since Thou on earth hast wept, and sorrowed oft alone,
If I must weep with Thee, my Lord, Thy will be done.
My Jesus, as Thou wilt! All shall be well for me;
Each changing future scene I gladly trust with Thee:
Straight to my home above I travel calmly on,
And sing, in life or death, "My Lord, Thy will be done."
Public domain hymn text (German, c. 1704; English translation 1854), based on Matthew 6:10 and Luke 22:42.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Benjamin Schmolck wrote "My Jesus, As Thou Wilt" around 1704, publishing it in his collection Heilige Flammen. Schmolck was born in 1672 in Silesia, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and followed his father into ministry, eventually becoming pastor of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Schweidnitz, where he remained for the rest of his life. Over his career he wrote roughly nine hundred hymns, touching on nearly every dimension of church, family, and personal devotion.
The hymn's theme of submission to God's will took on a weight in Schmolck's own life that he could not have anticipated when he first wrote it. Later in his ministry, he lost two of his children in a house fire, and he himself eventually became paralyzed and blind, living out his final years as an invalid. The prayer he had written decades earlier — "my Lord, Thy will be done," repeated at the close of every stanza — became, by necessity, the daily posture of his own life.
The English translation used today comes from Jane L. Borthwick, a Scottish hymn translator who rendered many German hymns into English in the mid-nineteenth century, publishing this one in 1854, exactly one hundred and fifty years after Schmolck first wrote it.
Each stanza applies the same submitted posture to a different circumstance — poverty, grief, an uncertain future — testing the same phrase against different kinds of hardship rather than simply stating it once. Read alongside what is known of Schmolck's later suffering, the hymn reads less like an abstract meditation on submission and more like a promise its author was eventually asked to keep in full.
