He Giveth More Grace
A poem by Annie Johnson Flint and the story of the life that formed her words.
Reading Psalm 6 the past week, I kept coming back to this powerful poem from Annie Johnson Flint.
Much like the psalmists, her writing flowed from a place of struggle. I’ll share some more about Annie’s story a bit later in this post. For now, let your heart soak up these grace-filled words. Words that flow to us from a secret place, drawn from a well of deep communion with God in suffering.
He Giveth More Grace by Annie Johnson Flint
He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength as our labors increase;
To added afflictions He addeth His mercy,
To multiplied trials He multiplies peace.
When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.
Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.
His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.
I first encountered the words of “He Giveth More Grace” on a recent album from Benjamin William Hastings. [You’ll find his version of “Giveth” at the end of this post.] I say “encountered” because I didn’t just hear words put to music. Her poem pulled me into a sacred place of confidence in the grace of God.
So, to find out more about the soil from which these life-giving words emerged, I looked into Annie Johnson Flint’s life. After all, these aren’t words you can make up if you’ve not walked through “multiplied trials” or known what it feels like to exhaust your “store of endurance.”
What I discovered about Annie’s life is equal parts humbling and challenging! I encourage you to re-read “He Giveth More Grace” once you know the shape of the road that was given her to walk.
Here is a snapshot based on Rowland Bingham’s short biography of her life.1 [All quotes in this section are from Bingham or from Annie’s poem.]
After losing both parents during childhood (Mr and Mrs Johnson), and both adoptive parents in her later teenage years (Mr and Mrs Flint), Annie experienced in her first twenty years more suffering than most endure in a lifetime. Then, in her early twenties, she was diagnosed with what would become debilitating arthritis, leaving her body deformed and confined to a wheelchair or a bed for the remaining 40+ years of her life.
For more than 4 decades of near-constant pain, of bedsores and boils, Annie was dependent on the care of others. Regular extended stays in the sanatorium and nursing care at home left her with bills she struggled to pay. She lived hand to mouth “but as she liked to have it expressed, the mouth was hers, and the hand was God's and His hand was never empty.”
Following an encounter with Jesus during childhood, Annie was a young lady of deep faith in Christ. She’d fallen in love with poetry in the Flint family library, so it’s no surprise she turned to writing to express her inner dialogue with the LORD through the darkest valleys of her life.
“With a pen pushed through bent fingers and held by swollen joints she wrote…” Each new poem “written from her bed of affliction.” When Annie could no longer write, she would dictate her poems and messages to friends, who became the pens she could no longer hold. She would not be kept from expressing her delight in God, no matter how desperate her situation. She “believed that He had work for her to do and she put her very best into the writing of her poems.”
“The result has been that her verses have an unusually deep appeal to human hearts. The simple reason is that she felt what she wrote, and out of the crucible of suffering she was able to administer that comfort to others wherewith she herself had been comforted of God.”
She felt what she wrote.
Reaching the end of herself, she felt love without limit. Growing ever weaker, she felt grace beyond measure. When she had nothing left in her “store of endurance,” she felt the provision of God who “ever yearns His resources to share.” And, long before she left this world in 1932 at the age of 65, Annie Johnson Flint had learned to “lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing…”
Her words were formed by her life with the LORD.
In sharing Annie’s story, I’m not trying to glamourise her suffering or hold her up as being more virtuous for it. Rather, it’s to show where her words came from and to uncover the reason why they carry such power.
As Rowland Bingham put it, “she never could have written as she did for the comfort and help of thousands of others if she had not had the background of facing those very crises in her own life.”
What for most would have been a life of despair was instead anchored to the highest hope. What looked like a life of lack was instead a channel of “infinite riches in Jesus…”
Annie Johnson Flint teaches us that no matter what we face in life, no matter how dark the valley, no matter how deep the suffering, the LORD meets us there.
Having climbed the hill at Golgotha, Jesus knew the worst affliction, the most extreme exhaustion, the total emptying of Himself. And He rose in ultimate triumph over it all! In Him, we can walk (as Annie did) through our lowest moments, the darkest nights of the soul, and know:
His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.
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Woah!! I cried and cried reading this one Dave! What a woman, what a God!!!