To the remotest ends of the earth

I've only been able to attend a handful of church services in the last two years, making it a real lift to me when this hymn, in my top 10 for sure, was chosen for the congregation to sing at a Bible conference meeting I attended last month:

1. Jesus! what a Friend for sinners!
   Jesus! Lover of my soul;
   Friends may fail me, foes assail me,
   He, my Savior, makes me whole.
   • Refrain:
     Hallelujah! what a Savior!
     Hallelujah! what a Friend!
     Saving, helping, keeping, loving,
     He is with me to the end.
2. Jesus! what a Strength in weakness!
   Let me hide myself in Him;
   Tempted, tried, in Him confiding,
   He, my Strength, my vict’ry wins.
3. Jesus! what a Help in sorrow!
   While the billows o’er me roll,
   Even when my heart is breaking,
   He, my Comfort, helps my soul.
4. Jesus! what a Guide and Keeper!
   While the tempest still is high,
   Storms about me, night o’ertakes me,
   He, my Pilot, hears my cry.
5. Jesus! I do now receive Him,
   More than all in Him I find;
   Christ in me, the Hope of glory,
   I am His, and He is mine.

6. John Wilbur Chapman is the author of the well-beloved song from 1910 and was born in Richmond, Indiana in 1859. His parents prepared him for a life of Christian ministry but "the young man felt he could never pinpoint a date for his conversion although he did make public his acknowledgment of Christ at age seventeen," according to a biography online.

7. Chapman's seminary years, 1879-1882, were spent at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a young minister he married in 1882 and the birth of his first child was followed by his wife's death one month later. Chapman's second wife died in 1907.

   "Chapman began his evangelistic work full time in 1893, preaching with D. L. Moody at the World's Fair and conducting many meetings on his own. He hired William Ashley 'Billy' Sunday as an advance man, thus giving him his start in evangelism.

   "From 1904-1909 Chapman began to develop and promote a new method of urban evangelism. His idea was to hold several meetings throughout a city simultaneously, thereby reaching more people and stirring more hearts to enter into Christian service. The first city to try Chapman's theory was Pittsburgh in 1904. Another campaign was planned and executed in Syracuse, New York, in 1906.

   "The first joint campaign was held in Philadelphia from March 12 to April 19, 1908. The city was divided into forty-two districts with twenty-one teams of evangelist-musicians. Three weeks were spent in each half of the city with estimates of eight thousand conversions. The following revival held in Boston from January 26 to February 17, 1909, is considered to be Chapman's most successful. The city was divided into twenty-seven districts and recorded seven thousand conversions.

   "The first Chapman-Alexander worldwide campaign left Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 26, 1909, and returned November 26. Stops along the way included: Melbourne, Sydney, Ipswich, Brisbane, Adelaide, Ballarat, Bendigo, and Townsville in Australia; Manila in the Philippines; Hong Kong, Kowloon, Canton, Shanghai, Hankow, Peking and Tientsin in China; Seoul, Korea; Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo, and Yokohama in Japan.

   "Chapman continued his non-stop evangelistic efforts in both the United States and Europe in 1910, including a very successful Chicago meeting from October 16 to November 27. However, Chapman's technique of mass evangelism lost much of its popularity. A series of unsuccessful campaigns were conducted in Bangor and Portland, Maine, and Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. Chapman was not credited with the failures, and so from 1912 on all the revivals were mass meetings led by Chapman.

   "Many services were conducted by the evangelist in the next couple of years in Australia, Scotland, Ireland, India, New Zealand, and the United States, averaging three to five sermons a day in many places. His career as evangelist ended with the Chapman-Alexander campaign January 6 to February 13, 1918."

8. "Charles McCallon Alexander, world famous song leader, who had been traveling with R. A. Torrey, joined with Chapman in 1907. The two men became a team and formed the 'Chapman-Alexander Simultaneous Campaign.' Enjoying the benefits of both their influences, the men were able to build a large group of evangelists and song leaders to assist them in the large city-wide campaigns."

9. ******

10. The great old American hymn "I Need Thee Every Hour," written in 1872 by Annie Hawks, has the third stanza, "I need Thee every hour, In joy or pain; Come quickly and abide, Or life is vain."

11. Annie Hawks (born in Hoosick, N.Y., 1835) never graduated from any school but always had a passion for books and read widely.

Hymnology Archive website shares this testimonial given while she was still alive: "At 14 her genius began to find expression in verse. The first poem she published appeared in a Troy, N.Y., newspaper. That poem at once attracted attention and was followed by others which were printed in various local papers.
"Miss Sherwood became the wife, in 1859, of Charles Hial Hawks, a resident of Hoosick. Mr. Hawks was a man of culture and intelligence, and he understood and appreciated his wife. In January, 1865, Mr. and Mrs. Hawks removed to Brooklyn, N.Y., in which city Mrs. Hawks still makes her home. Her husband died there in 1888. They had three children, one of whom, a daughter, is now living.
"Mrs. Hawks has always been identified with the Baptist denomination. In 1868, her pastor and friend, Rev. Dr. Robert Lowry, requested her to turn her attention to hymn writing. She did so, and wrote, among many others, 'In the Valley,' 'Good Night,” and 'Why Weepest Thou?'
Another testimony during her life came from Frances Willard & Mary Livermore:
"Few of the millions of people, old or young, who have heard, sung, or read the beautiful hymn ['I need Thee every hour,'] know that its writer, Mrs. Annie Sherwood Hawks, is still living, and 'carries on an extensive correspondence with friends all over the country, and receives many visitors.' She is the last of three women hymn writers whose fame is world-wide — the other two, both of whom were blind, being Fanny Crosby, who died recently, and Alice Holmes, who went to her reward over a year ago.
"Mrs. Hawks is the author of over four hundred hymns, but the one by which she is best known is 'I Need Thee Every Hour,' written in [1872]. It is said that this hymn has been translated into more foreign languages than any other of modern times. …
"Women have ever held an exalted position among the writers of hymns that have been and are a strong factor in turning the hearts of men and women to God, moulding religious life and keeping the spiritual fires burning. That their words have been carried to the remotest ends of the earth is but small recognition of their help, comfort, and uplift to the entire world of mankind."
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To appropriate anything into your Christian walk, there are two things you have to have.

"The first thing is you've got to know about it; you have to see what you already have in Christ," explains Richard Jordan. "Get a grip on the riches that are yours in Christ Jesus with a literal reality of your current identity at this moment in Him.

"The key to the Christian life is knowing your identity and you can never know it if you don't study the Bible rightly-divided.

"The other component is you not only have to know who you are, you have to be aware of your NEED of it. Because you'll never reach out and appropriate into your experience something unless you know that you really need it.

"That's what happened to Paul in Romans 7. He wasn't identifying himself as God did. He slipped back into identifying himself as HE identified himself.

"Paul says in one little phrase in Galatians 20, 'Yet not I, but Christ.' You got to have those 'It's not I' moments where you become aware of your bankruptcy so that the riches of Christ become the thing that's the need of your heart.

"Appropriating into your experience is closed to all but the needy heart. It's available only to those who'll say, 'It's not I, but Christ.' And with those two things--a conscious awareness of faith-trust in who you are and then a realization of your absolute need in every moment for it--you then need a lifetime of spiritual growth.

"Friend, it takes time for the Holy Spirit to work that process into the details of your life. That's why Romans 7 is not in Romans 2 or 5.

"We've all experienced this where you get on the mountaintop and it's, 'I've got the joy, joy, joy down in my heart,' and then a little while later you're down in the doldrums and you say, 'I don't think I'll ever see the mountaintop again for the clouds.'

"When you're in those moments of need, rather than being mad or depressed, that's a moment to say, 'You know, here's a Not-I experience. I'm down here because I've been trusting me. Here's an opportunity to grow because that's exactly what God's grace is trying to get me to . . .' "