Fanny Crosby's beloved 1890 hymn "He Hideth My Soul" celebrates Jesus as our wonderful Savior and safe refuge in the cleft of the rock. From burden-lifted rest to daily strength to future glory, it is a timeless invitation to hide your life in the depths of His love.
Welcome to another Friday Classic Hymn. I haven't done one of these for a while, but I've done over 100! If you want to look through the whole archive, they're all there. In this series, I take classic hymns, tell the story behind the hymn, explore the lyrics in depth and then sing it. I'm sure you'll enjoy this if you enjoy these classics.
I wonder if you know today's Friday Classic: "He Hideth My Soul"? If you do, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the song in the comments! What has the song meant to you? What do the lyrics mean to you? Share and let's chat down in the comments below.
If you haven't yet, please subscribe to the channel and join me here for some good, godly music. First, let me take you through the history behind this classic.
The Story Behind "He Hideth My Soul"
I've spoken about Fanny Crosby a bunch of times on my channel. I've covered some of her more popular hymns and sung many of her songs. She was famously blinded at a young age by an incompetent doctor, and even so became such a joyful and upbeat person.
Read her autobiography if you can find it online - just search for it and I'm sure you'll find it. I read it some years ago and was so impressed by her joy, her infectious joy in her writing!
Despite this tragedy in her life, she became a prolific writer of hymns. She taught at the Institute for the Blind in New York for a couple of decades, where she met her husband, a blind musician, and they say she wrote over 8,000 hymns, a lot of them under pseudonyms.
This one was written when one of her frequent collaborators, William J. Kirkpatrick, came to her with a tune. Kirkpatrick was quite a famous writer in those days. In fact, in my Canaan Melodies project, in which I'm recording songs from the old 1914 Nazarene hymnal, I see his name a lot. He wrote the tune for a lot of them, and sometimes the lyrics as well, though mostly the tunes.
In this case, he came to Fanny Crosby with a tune that he had written, and he played it for her. As the story goes, by the end of the day she had written lyrics to match his beautiful tune. The song was published in 1890, and it has always been linked to this tune by Kirkpatrick. It has been published in many hymnals ever since and is something of a favourite.
In fact, it seems that this was one of Fanny Crosby's own favourites. Some people claim it was this one, others claim it was another, so who really knows? But the fact is that she seemed to really like this one.
She died as an old lady in her 90s, and she's still revered as one of the great hymnwriters.
Let's take a look at the lyrics that she wrote.
What Do the Lyrics of "He Hideth My Soul" Mean?
Verse 1
A wonderful Saviour is Jesus my Lord,
a wonderful Saviour to me;
I love how personal that is: a wonderful Saviour to me. Jesus is personally her Saviour. It's not just a theory to her, it's real to her! And that word "wonderful" is very special. It's a word we sing in a lot of our different hymns and songs. The one I think of straight away is "He's altogether lovely, altogether worthy, altogether wonderful". He's wonderful, isn't He? Just amazing in so many ways, our Saviour.
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock.
She feels as if her soul, her inner self, is safe, hidden in the Rock that is Jesus. Jesus is the Rock of Ages; and this is good old biblical imagery - there's another hymn that uses it as well, and I've done a Friday Classic on "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee". It uses very similar language, teaching us that having faith in Christ is like taking refuge in a rock.
The imagery comes from Exodus 33, where God says to Moses, I'm going to pass by you, but you take refuge in the rock, so that when My glory comes, it doesn't kill you, because no one can see My face and live. In Christ we hide, and the glory of the Lord doesn't kill us, because it's so great that our bodies can't handle it.
But it's a safe place as well! Some people would call it a safe place from God's judgment. Some take the view that putting your faith in the One who died on the cross is like hiding in His shelter, so that when the judgment of God comes, you're safe, blessed by your faith. It might be that.
It might just be talking about how, in the storms of life, you can hide safely with God. Whichever the case, it's a good line to sing.
Where rivers of pleasure I see.
Hidden there with God, we have much pleasure. It's not a downer, or a sombre and serious experience - it's a full, delightful experience to be with God.
Refrain
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
that shadows a dry, thirsty land;
This comes straight out of Isaiah 32:2. Have a look at this verse: "Each one will be like a shelter from the wind and a refuge from the storm, like streams of water in the desert and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land." The world is thirsty, but in the shadow of the Rock we find what we need in Christ's embrace. You might say we are fed and well satisfied. We drink from His river of delights, and we are satisfied.
He hideth my life in the depths of His love,
and covers me there with His hand.
Oh, beautiful. This is not just that He hides you, but that He loves you, and as He embraces you, that is where you find your worth and your healing. He covers you there in that place.
This image of being covered and hidden in Christ is, for me, a picture of a warm embrace. Sometimes we think of Jesus as a slender little man, but He was a carpenter, so He was a big guy. I can imagine Him embracing people and almost covering them in His hug! In a sense, that's what God does for us: He embraces us so warmly and covers us that we feel so safe.
I've got nine-month-old twins, and they're tiny, very tiny. Jonathan, our little boy, has been quite sick of late. He literally climbs up my legs, and I gather him up in my arms, and he buries his face in my chest and sobs in his sickness. These last few days I've been trying to hold him close. I think that's a picture of what God does for us, holding us like this, hiding us in His arms and His warm embrace.
Do you know the love of God like this? If your faith is so academic that you don't know God like this, if you have so much in your head that you don't know this love in your heart, maybe you've missed something.
Verse 2
A wonderful Saviour is Jesus my Lord,
He taketh my burden away;
She's probably referring to the burden of sin. This is a common theme in the Scriptures, that we are burdened by our sins, but Jesus washes them away and we don't carry that burden anymore. It can't mean that He just takes away our difficulties in life, because that's not true. No Christian will tell you that they believed in Jesus and everything went fine after that. The burdens and difficulties of life are still there. But the burden of your sin, the weight of its guilt and the power it has over you, is taken away when you know Jesus as your Saviour.
He holdeth me up, and I shall not be moved,
He giveth me strength as my day.
Very biblical wording again. One of the great verses in the Psalms is 55:22: "Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous be shaken." The old King James says, "He shall never be moved." That's where she's getting those words. With your faith in Him, your burdens are taken away, especially the burdens of sin, and then you are safe.
"You shall not be moved" doesn't mean you'll never move again. It means that you won't move outside of His love, and that He'll give you strength for each day. That's biblical too - Deuteronomy 33:25 says, "The bolts of your gates will be iron and bronze, and your strength will equal your days." She's using that imagery here. She's saying He gives me enough strength for all of my days. Isn't that a great promise from the Lord, that throughout your days, whatever you're going to go through, He will give you the strength to go through it?
Take hope in this today as you hear the song: He will give you strength for every day. He will take away the burden of sin. He will help you along and help you to stand, and He will give you new strength.
Verse 3
With numberless blessings each moment He crowns,
and filled with His fullness divine,
Scripture often talks about how He crowns us, and this is so true. We have numberless blessings. Another hymn I've covered in this series is "Count Your Blessings, Name Them One by One". My gran used to always say we can't do that, we run out of hands very quickly. Yes, He blesses us so, and we are filled with His fullness divine. Isn't it a thought that the Spirit within us gives us His fullness?
I sing in my rapture, O glory to God
for such a Redeemer as mine!
"Rapture" is a word Fanny Crosby uses in other hymns as well. In one of her most famous, "To God Be the Glory", she wrote: "Purer and higher and greater will be our wonder, our rapture, when Jesus we see." Here she's saying, I sing in my rapture, and she's not talking about being taken up into the clouds by God one day. She's talking about rapture as joy in her soul, as though her soul is so lifted up that she sings. Beautiful words of praise!
Verse 4
When clothed in His brightness, transported I rise
to meet Him in clouds of the sky,
Okay, there's the rapture, as many people understand it. Maybe we're all going to be lifted up together one day when He comes again. She lived in the age when the rapture theory was really starting to take hold in America, so it could be that she was thinking, "One day I'm going to be raptured." It could be that she just thought, "One day, in my own soul, I will be in heaven and I will rise to meet Him there in the clouds of the sky." I'm not sure.
His perfect salvation, His wonderful love,
I'll shout with the millions on high.
Now she's thinking, "When I'm in heaven, I'll be shouting with all the saints who've gone before me, and all the ones who are there with me, of the salvation that He has brought me." The hymns often look ahead to heaven. Maybe we've lost that in some of our songs! Of course, we don't want to be so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good, but perhaps we don't sing enough about the life to come, as the hymns encourage us to do.
Conclusion
What a beautiful hymn! Did some of the words speak to you? Share with me in the comments where God spoke to you in this hymn.
For me, He giveth me strength as my day was a great line to hang on to. Whatever day I'm facing, I know that I'll have strength for it, for as long as my days on earth. That's a great encouragement to me. What about you? Please share.
Before we sing it, thank you for supporting my ministry. Many of you donate on my Patreon, where you get all my music downloads, so if you'd like to do that, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, donations on PayPal and so on really help me in my ministry. Thank you so much.
Let's sing it to Kirkpatrick's original tune. I hope you'll sing along and join me here on Fridays for more classic hymns.
Sources
Hymnary.org, “He Hideth My Soul” (The Finest of the Wheat, 1890): https://hymnary.org/hymn/CYBER/2269
Hymnary.org, “He Hideth My Soul” (Gospel hymnal, 1890): https://hymnary.org/hymn/CG2C1890/187
Hymnary.org, text record: https://hymnary.org/text/a_wonderful_savior_is_jesus_my_lord_a_wo
Hymns for Worship, “SDAH 520: He Hideth My Soul”: https://hymnsforworship.org/sdah-520-hideth-soul/
Melody Publications, “He Hideth My Soul - Fanny Crosby”: https://melodypublications.com/blogs/news/he-hideth-my-soul-fanny-crosby
Pilgrim Ministry, “A Wonderful Savior Is Jesus My Lord”: https://pilgrimministry.org/e-literature/a-wonderful-savior-is-jesus-my-lord
Billy Graham Center Archives, Papers of Fanny Crosby: https://archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/4/resources/51
Hymnology Archive, “Fanny Crosby”: https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/fanny-crosby
Hymnology Archive, “William J. Kirkpatrick”: https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/william-kirkpatrick
Wholesome Words, “Frances Crosby Van Alstyne” by Edward S. Ninde: https://wholesomewords.org/biography/bcrosby4.html
Encyclopedia.com, “Crosby, Frances J(ane)”: https://encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/crosby-frances-jane-1820-1915-fanny-j-crosby
Hymnary.org, Kirkpatrick tune notes (Bert Polman): https://hymnary.org/tune/there_rolled_through_time_a_kirkpatrick
Wikipedia, “William J. Kirkpatrick”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Kirkpatrick
