I refer to our column of two weeks ago. What links Horatio Spafford’s 1873 hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul,” Mercy Me’s present-day song of praise, “Even If,” and Daniel’s scriptural words in the Old Testament, “But if not…”?
The immediate, and correct, answer is “faith.” What is their faith in, exactly? We respond, “In God!” And we might reply, “in His will.” Praise God! Yes! All of those responses are correct replies.
Nonetheless, when we answer that way, we are usually thinking of answered prayers for healing of serious diseases, safety on the highway or on the streets, and in busy (often dangerous), public places, safety in the air and on the rails, protection from the COVID-19 variants, recovery from serious accidental injuries, and enough food, shelter, warmth, and medical care, for our families, and enough to help our neighbors, aren’t we?
Such concerns are important matters, and God gives us responsibility for striving alongside Him in attending to them.
All of the above is a true concern of faith. Still, what is our greatest faith need? What does each soul stand most in need of, from God?
Horatio Spafford’s text of “It Is Well With My Soul,” composed where his four young daughters had drowned, just days earlier, gives insight. Bearing crushing sorrow, which he compared in his first stanza to the rolling “sea billows” he gazed out upon as he wrote, and in great need of personal consolation, this Christian father concentrated, still, and most strongly, on the last three of his four stanzas, in which he named the deepest of all our needs.
And in those verses, he rejoiced in the “glorious tho’t” of our ultimate blessing, the “blest assurance” of salvation, and our gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus.
Tho Satan should buffet, tho trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
My sin — O the bliss of this glorious tho’t —
My sin, not in part, but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more:
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
And, Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll:
The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend,
“Even so” — it is well with my soul.
I repeat: Spafford named his, and our, deepest need — forgiveness of our sin, “not in part, but the whole,”; and our truest blessing, salvation and, for each of us, the “blest assurance … that Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, and hath shed His own blood for my soul.” Believing the Gospel, and clinging in trust to it, this man of faith rejoiced, even as he endured the worst of life’s injuries and losses.
In his thankful praise, Spafford revealed also our next, our second, deepest need, I believe I have learned; specifically, our need for hearts and spirits of gratitude to God, for His costly grace in forgiveness of our sin and for our salvation; gratitude like Spafford’s, “Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!” Thanksgiving strengthened Horatio Spafford in his darkest suffering.
Spafford’s gratitude, even in grief, reminds us of David’s trust, which surely gave him inspiration. It reminds me of my mother’s shouting praise, despite the stillborn birth of the little son she had hoped to raise.
I want that kind of gratitude.
Spafford’s fourth stanza witnesses to and testifies of, trust and faith in the final, end-time consummation of God’s divine plan in eternity. At that time, Horatio Spafford knew and rejoiced, that the Resurrection will unite again his family, in eternal life with God.
There, rested this hymnist’s abiding belief, and his trusting assurance, of seeing his children again. There, rested my mother’s trust in God’s mercy, as she suffered her baby’s death and her own near-death from a gangrenous infection, but rising to shout her praise to God again.
Eulogizing his children in verse, Horatio Spafford gave Spirit-filled witness to the heart and core of Christian faith, through a hymn for all of us, and for all time.
It is well with my soul,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Kenneth Osbeck wrote: “In 1881, the Spafford’s … left Chicago with their two young daughters and a group of friends and settled in Jerusalem. There they established the American Colony which cared for the sick and the destitute.”
Hallelujah!
Thanks be to God.