O To Be Like Thee!
O to Be like Thee!
O to be like Thee! blessed Redeemer,
This is my constant longing and prayer;
Gladly I’ll forfeit all of earth’s treasures,
Jesus, Thy perfect likeness to wear.
O to be like Thee! O to be like Thee,
Blessed Redeemer, pure as Thou art!
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness—
Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart.
O to be like Thee! full of compassion,
Loving, forgiving, tender and kind;
Helping the helpless, cheering the fainting,
Seeking the wand’ring sinner to find.
O to be like Thee! while I am pleading,
Pour out Thy Spirit, fill with Thy love;
Make me a temple meet for Thy dwelling,
Fit me for life and heaven above.
WHEN PEOPLE WERE INTRODUCED to Thomas O. Chisholm, the author of this hymn and of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” (October 15), he would often say, “Aw, I’m just an old shoe!”
Born in a Kentucky log cabin in 1866, Chisholm was self-educated and began teaching in a rural school when he was sixteen. At the age of twenty-seven, the Kentucky farm boy wrote this hymn, “O to Be like Thee!” He served on the staff of the Pentecostal Herald in Louisville until his health broke. He was accepted as a traveling preacher in the Methodist Church, but once again health problems caused him to resign. Regretfully he had to leave the ministry. Eventually he became a life insurance agent.
Throughout his life he displayed many of the characteristics that he praised in Jesus in the hymns he wrote. Chisholm, who described himself as an old shoe, was perhaps more like Christ than he realized.
Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.
1 John 3:2
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