Thomas Obadiah Chisholm

Thomas Obadiah Chisholm was an American Methodist minister, editor, insurance worker, poet, and hymn writer born near Franklin, Kentucky, in 1866. His formal education was limited to the local district school, yet by sixteen he was teaching and by his early twenties he was working for a hometown newspaper. During a revival conducted by Henry Clay Morrison in the 1890s, Chisholm underwent a Christian conversion and subsequently joined Morrison's Pentecostal Herald in Louisville as office editor and business manager.

Chisholm entered the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1903, but poor health forced him to leave pastoral work after a brief appointment at Scottsville, Kentucky. He later supported his family through insurance work while continuing to write poetry and hymns. A near-contemporary biographical sketch records that he sent some of his earliest hymn texts to Fanny Crosby, who returned them with criticism and encouragement. Over his lifetime he produced more than twelve hundred poems, hundreds of which appeared in religious periodicals.

For “Living for Jesus,” Chisholm faced an unusual assignment: Carl Harold Lowden asked him to write words to an already existing melody. Chisholm initially hesitated because his normal method was to write poetry first and have musicians set it afterward. He eventually completed the text in 1917. His other enduring hymns include “O to Be Like Thee” and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”