Jesus Paid It All

Jesus Paid It All[i] is one of the “standard” songs I grew up singing in church. It exalts all salvation in the death of Jesus Christ. According to John Julian (Dictionary of Hymnology, Appendix, Part II, 1907) this hymn was “written on the fly-leaf of the New Lute of Zion, in the choir of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Baltimore, in the spring of 1865.” Elvina Mable Reynolds Hall is the author of this hymn.[ii] She first married Richard Hall, and was a widow at the time she wrote the hymn. He died in 1859. She later married Thomas Myers, a Methodist minister, 1885. The hymn was published in Ira D. Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos in 1878 (No. 855), and the five stanzas below are from that source.[iii]

John T. Grape wrote the tune, All to Christ. He was a member, steward, and choir director of the Monument Street Methodist Church in Baltimore. He was also choir director at the Hartford Avenue Methodist Church later.

1. I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small,
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

Refrain:
Jesus paid it all—

All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain;
He washed it white as snow.

2. Lord, now indeed I find
Thy power and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.

3. For nothing good have I
Whereby Thy grace to claim—

I’ll wash my garments white
In the blood of Calvary’s Lamb.

4. When from my dying bed

My ransomed soul shall rise,

Then “Jesus paid it all!”

Shall rend the vaulted skies.

5. And when, before the throne,
I stand in Him complete,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
My lips shall still repeat.

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[i] The song is also known as I Hear the Saviour Say and Christ All and in All.

[ii] IndependentBaptist.com tells this Story Behind The Hymn.

[iii] But perhaps earlier in other sources. The first occasion may have been in Sabbath Carols: A New Collection of Music and Hymns by Theodore E. Perkins in 1868, where it was called Fullness in Christ.