"The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many." Mark 10:45
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Words: Frances Ridley Havergal, 1858.
Music: "Kenosis," Philip Paul Bliss, in Sunshine for Sunday Schools, 1873
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This was Frances Havergal's first hymn. She wrote it after seeing Sternberg's painting Ecce Homo in Dnsseldorf, Germany. A caption on the painting read, "This have I done for thee; what has thou done for Me?" Here is what Miss V. G. Havergal wrote about this hymn:
In F. R. H's MS. copy, she gives this title, "I did this for thee; what hast thou done for Me?" Motto placed under a picture of our Saviour in the study of a German divine. On January 10, 1858, she had come in weary, and sitting down she read the motto, and the lines of her hymn flashed upon her. She wrote them in pencil on a scrap of paper. Reading them over she thought them so poor that she tossed them on the fire, but they fell out untouched. Showing them some months later to her father, he encouraged her to preserve them, and wrote the tune Baca specially for them. The hymn was printed on a leaflet, 1859, and in Good Words, Feb., 1860. Pub. also in The Ministry of Song, 1869. Though F. R. H. consented to the alterations in Church Hymns, she thought the original more strictly carried out the idea of the motto, "I gave My life for thee, What hast thou done for Me?"
Frances Havergal herself said about this hymn:
I was so overwhelmed on Sunday at hearing three of my hymns touchingly sung in Perry Church, that I never before realized the high privilege of writing for the "great congregation," especially when they sang, "I gave My life for thee" to my father's tune Baca.