The Story Behind 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus'

The story behind What a Friend We Have in Jesus is tender and sad in equal measure. Joseph Scriven wrote the words around 1855, not as a hymn for the world, but as a private comfort for his mother — ill and far away across the Atlantic. The man who taught the church to "take it to the Lord in prayer" had carried more grief than most.

Who wrote it?

Joseph Medlicott Scriven was born in Ireland in 1819 and later emigrated to Canada. By the accounts that have come down to us, his life was shadowed by loss. A young woman he was to marry died, by tradition, shortly before their wedding day in Ireland; a later engagement in Canada also ended in bereavement. He never married. He lived simply, often in poverty, and was known for giving away his goods and his labour to the poor and the sick around him.

Out of that life — not despite its sorrows but through them — came a hymn about a Friend who never leaves.

A letter, not a performance

Scriven wrote the lines to console his mother during an illness, sending them across the ocean when he could not go himself. He did not put his name to them or seek their publication. For a time no one was even certain who had written them; the poem circulated on its own before Scriven was identified as the author. The story goes that a neighbour, finding the verses during Scriven's own illness late in life, asked about them, and he answered that "the Lord and I did it between us."

Grief that knows where to go

Read in light of the author's life, the hymn stops being a gentle platitude and becomes hard-won counsel. "Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged — take it to the Lord in prayer." "Are we weak and heavy-laden, cumbered with a load of care?" The questions are not rhetorical for Scriven. He had known trials, temptations and a heavy load of care, and he had learned where to carry them.

The refrain of the whole hymn is really its first line: "What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear." Not only sins — griefs. That word, from a man well acquainted with grief, is the heart of the hymn.

Why the story matters

It is easy to hear this hymn as sentimental until you know who wrote it and why. Then it changes. It becomes the testimony of a lonely, generous man who had buried his hopes more than once and still insisted, to his sick mother and to anyone who would sing it after, that there is a Friend who bears what we cannot. The hymn does not deny the trouble. It tells us what to do with it.

Sitting with it at home

If you would like to study this hymn slowly, our What a Friend We Have in Jesus Deep-Dive Study gathers the full public-domain text, the story of Joseph Scriven's life and losses, the scripture behind each verse, and reflection questions for a week of readings.

You might also enjoy the story behind Amazing Grace or our list of five public-domain hymns every family should know.