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“Let go and let God” is not in the Bible. It is not a verse in the King James, and it is not a verse in any other standard English translation — search the phrase in a Bible and you get nothing back. Almost everyone assumes it is scripture, and it is easy to see why. It sounds exactly like one. Most of us first heard it from someone who loved us and meant it kindly.
It is also about a hundred years old, and it did not start where nearly everyone thinks it did.
Where “let go and let God” actually comes from
The Library of Congress has digitised millions of pages of old American newspapers in an archive called Chronicling America. Search it for this exact phrase and forty-seven pages come back. The oldest is dated 15 September 1917.
It is the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, a small paper in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, reporting on a tabernacle revival meeting in town. The paper printed the preacher’s closing appeal:
“Will you let go and let God have a chance at your heart, or will you resist God and die? Decide tonight.”
A year later, on 28 September 1918, the Harrisburg Telegraph in Pennsylvania ran its weekly list of church services. One of the sermons that Sunday evening was titled “Let Go and Let God.” Within a year of its earliest printing, the line was already a sermon title.
Then, in October 1919, the Clinch Valley News of Jeffersonville, Virginia, published a piece about the evangelist Paul Rader and handed him the credit outright. It called the line “that God-given epigram, ‘Let go, and let God.'”
Paul Rader was not a minor figure. He lived from 1879 to 1938, pastored Chicago’s Moody Church from 1915 until 1921, later served as president of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and was an early pioneer of religious radio. If anyone put this phrase into wide circulation, he is the best-documented candidate we have.
Worth saying plainly, though: a 1919 newspaper crediting him is good evidence that he was known for the line. It is not proof that he invented it. The Arkansas printing is two years earlier, and we do not know who was preaching in that tent.
The phrase spread fast after that. In November 1919 the Bystander in Des Moines, Iowa — a paper published for the city’s Black community — gave what may be the clearest early explanation of it ever written, splitting the saying into its two halves: “when we ‘let go’ we give up to God all there is of ourselves.”
By May 1921 it was the title of an address at a Christian Endeavor convention in Laramie, Wyoming. By August 1922 the Bisbee Daily Review in Arizona was announcing a Baptist sermon with this underneath it: “Let go of sin and self and let God save, sanctify and send.”
No, it did not come from Alcoholics Anonymous
This is the part that surprises people most. “Let go and let God” is strongly associated with twelve-step recovery, and understandably so — it is a near-perfect summary of the third step, and it is said in recovery rooms around the world every day.
But Alcoholics Anonymous dates its own founding to 10 June 1935. The Oxford Group, the Christian fellowship whose ideas early AA drew on, was not even known by that name until around 1928. The phrase was in American newspapers eighteen years before AA existed.
AA did not invent “let go and let God.” It inherited a line that was already old, and carried it further than the preachers ever could have.
Two other origins get repeated online and neither holds up. One credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book Positive Thinking for a Time Like This — but that was published in 1975, more than half a century too late. Another traces it to nineteenth-century Keswick “higher life” teaching, which is at least plausible in spirit, but nobody repeating it offers a printed source you can check. The honest position is that no one has established who said it first. What we can show is where it was already being said, and when.
And in 1917 it did not mean what it means now
Here is the second surprise, and it is the bigger one. In those earliest printings, the phrase has nothing to do with anxiety.
Nobody in 1917 was using it to mean “stop worrying about your situation.” Every early use is about conversion — handing over the whole of yourself, once. Let God have a chance at your heart. Let go of sin and self. Give up to God all there is of ourselves.
The modern use — taking one specific problem you cannot fix and releasing your grip on that — came later. The saying did not shrink because anyone was careless. It shrank the way sayings do, by being useful.
What the Bible says instead, and the verb it actually uses
Psalm 46:10 is the verse people reach for, and it is a good instinct. The King James reads:
“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”
And here is something genuinely lovely: the Hebrew behind “be still” really does mean something close to “let go.” The word is harpu, Strong’s H7503, from the root raphah — to slacken, to sink, to let drop. It is a command in the plural. Let your hands fall.
But read the verse just before it. Psalm 46:9:
“He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.”
Psalm 46 is standing on a battlefield. “Be still” is not said to a tired person on a sofa. It is said to people holding weapons. It is much closer to drop it than to relax.
Then there is 1 Peter 5:7, the other verse people have in mind: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” That sentence does not start there. It starts in verse 6: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time.”
And Psalm 55:22: “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.”
Now look at the verb in all three. Not release. Not let go of. Cast. Throw. Hand over.
That is an action with a direction and a destination. You cannot cast something into nowhere. Something has to be on the receiving end, or you have not cast anything — you have just opened your hand.
Which, as it happens, is what the 1917 preacher was getting at too. “Let God have a chance at your heart” names the destination. The saying has two halves for a reason, and the second half is the one that keeps getting dropped.
The one verb God is never said to do
One more thing, and it is the part worth carrying out of here.
That root raphah — the “let go” of Psalm 46:10 — turns up again in Deuteronomy 31:6:
“Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”
“He will not fail thee” is, in the Hebrew, yarpeka — the same root. Will not slacken. Will not loosen the grip. Will not let go.
So the one verb the Hebrew uses for letting go is the one thing God is said never to do to you. You are the one told to loosen your hold. God is not. That is a very different arrangement from two people both letting go at once.
Why the difference is not pedantry
“Let go and let God” is almost never said casually. It gets said to someone who has run out of road. A marriage. An addiction, their own or someone else’s. A child who will not come home. A diagnosis. Someone who has already tried everything they can think of and is simply tired.
And “let go” lands two completely different ways on a person in that place.
For some it lands as relief: you are allowed to stop carrying this by yourself. For others it lands as a verdict: your effort was the problem, you are holding on too tight, you should have had more faith. Those are opposite messages, and the phrase on its own does not tell you which one is meant.
The scriptural version is harder to misread, because the destination is built into it. Casting is not release — it is transfer. Nobody is telling you the weight does not matter. They are telling you where to put it, and who is strong enough to hold it. It is the same distinction we ran into with “God won’t give you more than you can handle”, another comforting line that is not in the Bible and that quietly puts the whole weight back on the person carrying it.
It is also worth knowing that the Bible’s own word for rest is not a word about doing nothing. Hebrew menuchah means arriving somewhere settled enough to stay. Rest, in that language, is a place you reach — not a grip you release.
And none of this makes the saying bad. It has steadied real people through real nights: in recovery rooms, in hospital corridors, in kitchens at three in the morning when there was genuinely nothing left to do. The preacher in Bisbee in 1922 had the shape of it right — “let go of sin and self and let God save, sanctify and send.” Send. There was always an action on the other side of it.
Nobody drowning has ever been helped by being told to relax. Someone drowning can be helped by a hand.
A short prayer, if you need one today
God, I do not know how to put this down.
I have been holding it so long I cannot tell any more where it ends and I begin.
I am not going to pretend I have stopped caring about it.
So I am not letting go of it into nothing. I am handing it to You.
Please take the part of it I was never able to carry.
And keep hold of me while I learn what to do with my hands.
Amen.
A question for you
Which saying have you always assumed was a Bible verse? Most of us are carrying at least one — “God works in mysterious ways,” “everything happens for a reason,” “this too shall pass.” Tell us the one you were most surprised about, and who you first heard it from. We read every comment, and these answers are how we choose what to look into next.
Questions and Answers
Is “let go and let God” in the Bible?
No. “Let go and let God” is not in the Bible. The phrase appears in no standard English translation — not the King James, and not any modern version. A Bible search for the exact words returns zero results. It is a modern English saying, roughly a hundred years old, that comes from American revival preaching rather than from scripture. The closest verses in meaning are Psalm 46:10 (“Be still, and know that I am God”), 1 Peter 5:7 (“Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you”) and Psalm 55:22 (“Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee”).
Where does “let go and let God” come from?
“Let go and let God” comes from early twentieth-century American revival preaching. The earliest printing findable in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper archive is 15 September 1917, in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, quoting a revival preacher’s appeal: “Will you let go and let God have a chance at your heart?” By 1918 it was a sermon title in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and by October 1919 the Clinch Valley News in Virginia was crediting the line to the evangelist Paul Rader. Nobody has established with certainty who said it first.
Did “let go and let God” come from Alcoholics Anonymous?
No — “let go and let God” is older than Alcoholics Anonymous, though AA is why most people know it. AA dates its founding to 10 June 1935, and the Oxford Group that influenced early AA was not known by that name until around 1928. The phrase was already in American newspapers in 1917. AA adopted a line that was already in circulation among preachers, and carried it much further than they ever could have.
What Bible verse is closest to “let go and let God”?
The verse closest to “let go and let God” is Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” The Hebrew behind “be still” is harpu (H7503, from the root raphah), which really does mean to slacken or let drop — so the idea is genuinely there. But Psalm 46:9 shows the setting is a battlefield, so it reads more like “drop your weapons” than “relax.” 1 Peter 5:7 and Psalm 55:22 are just as close, and both use a stronger verb than “let go”: cast, meaning throw or hand over.
Does “let go and let God” mean stop trying?
“Let go and let God” was not originally about stopping. In its earliest recorded uses, from 1917 to 1922, it was an appeal about conversion — giving God the whole of yourself — and it was usually paired with an action. One 1922 Arizona sermon notice put it as “let go of sin and self and let God save, sanctify and send.” The Bible’s nearest verses point the same way: they say cast your burden, which is a transfer to someone able to carry it, not a release into nothing. Read that way, the saying means stop carrying it alone, not stop caring.
Is it “let go and let God” or “let go let God”?
Both forms are in use, and neither is a Bible verse. “Let go and let God” is the older and more common wording, and it is the version that appears in the 1917–1922 newspaper record. “Let go, let God” is a shortened modern form, and you will also see “learn to let go and let God” and “let go and let God handle it.” None of these phrasings appear in any translation of the Bible.
If you want to share this
Short version: I have said “let go and let God” my whole life assuming it was a verse. It is not in the Bible at all. Oldest printing anyone can find is an Arkansas newspaper from 1917 — eighteen years before AA existed.
The part that got me: The Bible never says “let go” of your burden. It says cast it. Throw it. Hand it over. That is a verb with a destination in it — and that is the whole difference between putting something down and putting it somewhere.
One more: The Hebrew word for “be still” in Psalm 46:10 is raphah — to let go. The same root shows up in Deuteronomy 31:6, where God “will not fail thee.” Will not slacken. Will not let go. You are the one told to loosen your grip. Reading which other sayings are not actually in there has been humbling in the best way.
