By John Ensor

 Like many of you, I have my favorite hymns and my number one favorite hymn for many years now has been that remarkable one “It Is Well With My Soul” written by Horatio Spafford. It’s a hymn that really points to the rest and peace that passes understanding, the confidence that one can have in God when God is all you have, when life is at its low ebb, when things are incalculable, when you’ve suffered tragedy and loss. To go back to those promises of Scripture that point to God’s sovereignty and the fact that nothing bad can happen to us that isn’t good for us through our faith in Jesus Christ is sort of the bedrock of our life. It’s certainly the confidence for me to go to hard places or to tackle hard things or to take a certain amount of risk knowing that no matter what happens, God’s in charge of our lives and that’s kind of what that hymn points to. In this particular case there is a very tragic story behind the hymn that many believers are familiar with. Horatio Spafford was the author of the hymn. He was born in 1828 and was married just as the Civil War broke out in 1861. He was drafted into the Civil War in 1865, but by then the war was ending and so he never really had to serve. By 1871 he was the father of four beautiful daughters. He was raised in a wealthy family and was highly educated, which explained why he liked to write and read poetry. He was a lawyer and had invested in a lot of property in the Chicago area. He was good friends with the greatest evangelist of his age, Dwight L. Moody in Chicago. He was a member of a Presbyterian Church there and a great contributor to the YMCA, which at that time was a very gospel-driven urban outreach to many families in the cities. In 1871 there was a great fire in Chicago and wiped out much of that city, including many of the properties that Spafford had owned. Many people are under the impression that it was due to the fire that Horatio Spafford lost a lot of his property and his wealth, but that’s not exactly true. He actually had a lot of property that was not affected by the fire. About two years later he decided to take his wife and his four daughters on a two-year extended vacation into Europe to visit museums. He wanted to work with D.L. Moody in Europe and visit the greatest preacher of that age, Charles Spurgeon. So they booked a passage on the most luxurious ship in the world at that time called the Ville de Havre, a French-owned ship. Right before they were ready to leave for New York to get on that ship, Horatio had an opportunity to sell some property. Now the truth of the matter is he was in pretty dire financial condition in spite of the way he was living his life and he needed to make that deal work. So he stayed behind to close that deal and sent his wife and his four daughters ahead to board the ship. He was going to meet them in London soon after he closed that deal. Unfortunately, in the sovereignty of God, the man that wanted to buy this property from Spafford died of a heart attack before the deal could be closed and it was never completed. It was about two or three days into the journey across the ocean that the ship was struck by another ship and tragically the Ville De Havre sank in about 15 minutes, at 2 a. m. in the morning when most people were in their bunks and never had a chance to survive. About 226 souls were lost in that shipwreck, including all four of Spafford’s daughters. Only his wife, Anna, survived that trip. She sent a telegram to him once she reached London saying that she had alone survived out of the family and that their close friends, the Goodwins, also lost their wife and their three children. Such a tremendous and horrifying tragedy to lose all four of your children in the shipwreck. Lots of people also believe that when Spafford took the next ship, he got to the place where his daughters died and he wrote the hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul” during that time period. That’s also not actually true, but he was told by the captain when they reached that point in the ocean where the ship went down. He did not write the hymn at that time but wrote it around two years later. At that time, it was being published and sung for the first time and the music was added to the verses. I have a picture of the original verses that were written of the hymn and it’s a beautiful hymn. It talks about when sorrows like sea billows roll, there’s still a peace like a river that attends our way. And it’s just a powerful hymn. But the real tragedy of this hymn is not the shipwreck that took the lives of his four daughters. The real tragedy of this hymn is that Spafford himself never lived out the faith that he was able to capture and put down in words in the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul”. Indeed, he veered off both from Orthodox Christianity and from a righteous lifestyle that you could admire. He quit his job after he returned to the United States and stopped his law practice. He borrowed money that he never repaid. He defaulted on a number of home mortgages that he took out that were never affected by the fire. And perhaps most shamefully, he was appointed the trustee for his niece whose parents had died and had left her an inheritance of about $8,000, which at that time was a great deal of money. To his great shame, he failed to pay her the interest on that money and a lawsuit was eventually filed against him, along with several other lawsuits for failure to pay his debts. And right as all this was about to collapse in on him because of his failure to walk with integrity in terms of money, he fled the United States and went to Jerusalem. He believed that the Lord was going to return eminently and so he wanted to go to Jerusalem to be there when the Lord returned. The point is that both in his finances and in his doctrine, he did not walk with integrity and he left all the standard doctrines of the faith. He got into more and more of an obsessive nature around the return of Christ. He ended up leaving the Presbyterian Church and starting a house church that had no clear theology or orthodoxy. His sister and wife became prophetesses and they began to have claims of direct communication with God. He stopped being intimate with his wife in this marriage because they had received a word from the Lord. All of these strange and sad things unfolded in his life. When I tried to reconcile the radiant beauty of this hymn with the tragic failure of his life, it’s not an easy thing to do because we want our lives to line up with our profession. But there is a warning in the Bible that comes to us from 1 Timothy chapter 1, verses 18 to 19. Paul, the apostle, is writing to young Timothy saying: “This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you. That by them you may wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting these, some have made a shipwreck of their faith.” And that’s precisely what happened in Horatio’s life. He abandoned the faith that would have helped him walk securely in the truth of the gospel and he abandoned his good conscience. He lived contrary to his conscience. He lived with a guilty conscience for many years, believing that somehow God was just going to give him the money that he needed to pay all these people back. But he never was able to confess. He was never able to set things right. He was never willing to change his lifestyle and reduce it so that he could pay these people back what he had borrowed from them. It ultimately led to the destruction of his life. Why do I bring this story up? Because as the leader of a Christian ministry I need to constantly oversee my own soul, spirit and my own conscience. We all need to do that. We need to be holding each other accountable to the faith and a good conscience that we’re doing our ministry in keeping with the revealed Word of God. And that we’re living by practices, especially in the handling of money, that commends a good conscience. This is a warning I take to my own soul: overseeing a ministry that relies on the good trust of other people to invest and to pray that we’re going to be constantly watching over our faith and our doctrine as well as our practices. For the glory of God. It is well with our soul, even though in Horatio Spafford’s own life he failed to live up to the words of his own great hymn. It’s still a hymn that I love very much. Thank you.