My Shepherd Will Supply My Need

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) is often called the father of English hymnody, and he almost couldn't help it. According to a cherished family story, he rhymed compulsively even as a small boy — caught giggling in family prayers, he explained that a mouse had just run up a rope, and 'there was a mouse for want of stairs / ran up a rope to say his prayers.'

As a young man, the story goes, he complained to his father that the congregation's psalm-singing was joyless and plodding. 'Then give us something better, young man,' his father replied — so he did. In Watts's day, English churches sang only strict, wooden translations of the psalms; over his lifetime he wrote hundreds of hymns that changed English worship forever, including 'Joy to the World,' 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,' and 'O God, Our Help in Ages Past.'

In 1719 Watts published his boldest project: The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament — the psalms rewritten as if David had known Christ. His Psalm 23 names the Shepherd outright ('Jehovah is His name'), turns the still waters into a 'living stream,' and adds a wanderer whom the Shepherd brings back — grace written into the oldest song of trust. He finished the collection after a long illness, offering it, he wrote, 'from a thankfull Heart.'

Then comes the ending, perhaps the most beloved final line in English hymnody. Where the psalm says 'I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,' Watts wrote what that actually feels like: 'No more a stranger, nor a guest, but like a child at home.'

Watts never heard the tune we sing. RESIGNATION is an anonymous American folk melody from the shape-note tradition — pentatonic, lilting, unmistakably Appalachian. It first appeared in print in 1828 in a Pennsylvania tunebook called The Beauties of Harmony, and it was first paired with Watts's psalm in 1836, more than a century after the words were written.

Frontier singing conventions carried the pairing across the South, and in our time Mack Wilberg's arrangement made it a Tabernacle Choir signature. The choir has sung it in general conferences for decades — including October 2024, just weeks after the hymn officially entered the hymnbook.

Latter-day Saints had loved this hymn from a distance for at least forty years — the Tabernacle Choir sang it in conference as far back as 1981, and the Church printed it in the Ensign — but it had never been in an official hymnal.

On September 12, 2024, it was released as hymn #1014 in the second batch of Hymns—For Home and Church, alongside 'Amazing Grace' and 'Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus' — a batch the Church described as sharing hymns with the wider Christian world. For a hymn about finally belonging — no more a stranger, nor a guest — it was a fitting arrival.