Is It Wrong to Sing 'Just As I Am'?

No — and it is worth knowing why the question comes up at all.

Read the text and the hymn keeps insisting that you have nothing. Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bid’st me come to Thee. The two exceptions to “without one plea” are not the singer’s: the blood was shed, and the bidding is Christ’s. A later stanza lists everything the singer lacks — sight, riches, healing of the mind — and locates every item outside himself. Another grounds the whole approach in a promise rather than a feeling: because Thy promise I believe. Charlotte Elliott wrote a hymn about empty hands, and it never stops saying so.

What the hymn does not do is tell you where the coming happens. It says come, and it leaves the place blank. That blank is what later hands filled in, until it became the standard invitation hymn of American revival meetings and “I came forward during Just As I Am” turned into an American sentence meaning this is when I got saved.

So the hymn is not the problem. Its situation is. Sung after a sermon that has just asked people to decide, it functions as the soundtrack of a transaction. Sung after the absolution, it means exactly what it says. Same words, different hymn.

If you want a place to put your coming, Scripture and the Confessions both put it where God promised to be: the font, the preached word, the bread and the cup. God gives faith where and when He pleases in those who hear the gospel (Augsburg Confession V) — not where and when we decide.