It Is Well With My Soul

One of the blessings of my job teaching at a Christian school--and one entirely unique in my prior work experience--is the chance to work to glorify Christ as part of my work. This past Monday at our English department staff meeting our department head played the hymn "It Is Well With My Soul" to get the meeting kicked off. There is something about that song. It stayed with my all day; I have been singing it in the shower all week.

Many of you know the backstory. Horatio Spafford, the hymn-writer, and how he came to write the song. Spafford was heavily invested in Chicago real estate and was nearly bankrupted by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Distraught, he scheduled a family vacation to Europe to relieve the stress on his family. Delayed by business, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him. On their Atlantic crossing, the ship carrying his wife and daughter was struck by another ship and most of the passengers, including Spafford's four daughters, were killed. Spafford's wife, Anna, lived and upon arriving in England telegrammed Spafford the haunting words, "Saved alone." 

Spafford left the United States to be with his wife and England and on the voyage across the ocean he penned the song "It Is Well With My Soul." The courage and faith required to write something like that in the face of such tragedy is something I cannot even imagine. 

The third verse of the song is my favorite and the reason the song has been playing on auto loop in my head this week:

My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought
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

The older I get the more aware I am of my own sin. I do not mean that I told a white lie to my wife last week or that I drank too much while in New York for a friend's wedding or that I swore while watching the Royals lose the World Series. I mean that deep down in my bones I am a sinner. That profound evil and depravity rule my nature. This awareness can easily lead to guilt and often has. But the faith that Christ has taken all of my sin and nailed it to the cross, that the record of debt that could be used to condemn me has been set aside, pulls me out of that despair.

In Knowledge of the Holy A.W. Tozer writes:

“The mercy of God is infinite too, and the man who has felt the grinding pain of inward guilt knows that this is more than academic.  ‘Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.’ Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind. However sin may abound, it still has its limits, for it is the product of finite minds and hearts; but God’s ‘much more’ introduces us to infinitude. Against our deep creature-sickness stands God’s infinite ability to cure.”

What Tozer is driving at here, and what Spafford assures us in his song, is that our sin is weak and empty in the face of what Christ has done. The love and grace of God to us is infinite--boundless--while our own sin and failure and evil is finite--contained. We can only do so much that is wrong, our depravity can only go so far. But the mercy of Christ is contained by nothing, is inexhaustible. Where my sin abounds, his grace abounds far more.

That is why we can say that it is well with our souls.