The hymn Standing on the Promises of God was written by composer Russell Kelso Carter (1849-1928). This hymn song reflects his personal experience as a petitioner before the throne of God.
Carter was apparently a star athlete and a top student. It was at the age of fifteen during a prayer meeting at the Pennsylvania Military Academy that he committed his life to the Lord. He became an instructor at the academy in 1869 and an athletics coach. Later, Carter allied himself with the Methodists and the holiness movement, becoming an ordained Methodist minister. His history, both personal and theological, passed through some deep and disturbing waters as he searched for balance in his belief.
Carter spent the last years of his professional life as a medical doctor. Somewhere in the midst of all his diverse adventures and professions he had time to become a musician and a songwriter. He worked with John Sweeney to produce, in 1886, Songs of Perfect Love, a hymnbook in which his famous hymn Standing on the Promises appeared, and with A.B. Simpson on Hymns of the Christian Life, published in 1891.
However, it wasn’t until Carter faced his own mortality that he came to understand exactly what it meant to rest on God’s promises. Diagnosed with a critical heart condition by age 30, Carter was facing imminent death.
Connie Ruth Christiansen writes: “He knelt and made a promise that healing or no, his life was finally and forever, consecrated to the service of the Lord.” Christiansen goes on to say that from that moment on the Scripture took on new life for Carter and he began to lean on the promises that he found in the Bible. He committed himself to believe, whether or not God granted him healing.
God chose to heal him and Carter lived, with a healthy heart, for another 49 years, though he would later suffer many other health issues from which God did not choose to heal him. In the end, Carter came to the conclusion that healing was God’s choice to make and that God also chose the instruments through which that healing, if granted, would come. His hymn was a personal testimony to his faith.
