'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus
How fitting that a missionary should write this hymn about faith and trust. Louisa M.R. Stead was born about 1850 in Dover, England, and became a Christian at age nine. She felt a burden to become a missionary in her teenage years. When she was 21 or so, she immigrated to the United States and attended a revival meeting in Urbana, Ohio. There the Lord deeply impressed her with a ringing missionary call. She made plans to go to China, but her hopes were dashed when her health proved too frail for the climate there. Shortly afterward, she married a man named Stead. But sometime around 1879 or 1880, Mr. Stead drowned off the coast of Long Island. Some accounts say that he saved a boy who was drowning, and other accounts say both Mr. Stead and the boy perished. Other records suggest it was his own four-year-old daughter, Lily, that he saved. In any event, the family's beach-side picnic ended in tragedy for Louisa. Shortly afterward, taking little Lily, Louisa went to South Africa as a missionary, and it was there during those days she wrote, "Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus." Louisa served in South Africa for fifteen years, and while there she married Robert Wodehouse. When her health forced a return to America, Robert pastored a local Methodist Church. In 1900 her health restored, Robert and Louisa attended a large missionary conference in New York, and were so enthused by the experience they again offered themselves as missionary candidates. They arrived as Methodist missionaries in Rhodesia on April 4, 1901. "In connection with this whole mission there are glorious possibilites," she wrote. "One cannot in the face of the peculiar difficulties help saying, 'Who is sufficient for these things?' but with simple confidence and trust we may do say, 'Our sufficiency is of God.'" Louisa retired in 1911, and passed away in 1917; but her daugher Lily, married missionary D.A. Carson and continued the work for many years at the Methodist mission station in southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
Excerpt from "Then Sings My Soul" by Robert J. Morgan
Thomas Nelson Publishers
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The music you are hearing is available for purchase!
"'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus" can be found on Dino's album All Creation Sings, along with many other wonderful hymns.
Click here to purchase this album! Also sample other tracks on the album online!
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Current Note:
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'Tis so sweet to trust in Je-sus, Just to take Him at His word;
Just to rest up-on His prom-ise; Just to know "Thus saith the
Lord." Je-sus, Je-sus how I trust Him! How I've proved Him o'er
and o're Je-sus, Je-sus, pre-cious Je-sus! O for grace to trust
Him more!
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