This was Franc­es Hav­er­gal’s first hymn. She wrote it af­ter see­ing Stern­berg’s paint­ing Ec­ce Ho­mo in Düs­sel­dorf, Ger­ma­ny. A cap­tion on the paint­ing read, “This have I done for thee; what has thou done for Me?” Here is what Miss V. G. Ha­ver­gal wrote about this hymn:

In F. R. H’s MS. co­py, she gives this ti­tle, “I did this for thee; what hast thou done for Me?” Mot­to placed un­der a pic­ture of our Sav­iour in the stu­dy of a Ger­man di­vine. On Jan­u­a­ry 10, 1858, she had come in wea­ry, and sit­ting down she read the mot­to, and the lines of her hymn flashed up­on her. She wrote them in pen­cil on a scrap of pa­per. Read­ing them over she thought them so poor that she tossed them on the fire, but they fell out un­touched. Show­ing them some months lat­er to her fa­ther, he en­cour­aged her to pre­serve them, and wrote the tune Ba­ca spe­cial­ly for them. The hymn was print­ed on a leaf­let, 1859, and in Good Words, Feb., 1860. Pub. al­so in <The Min­is­try of Song, 1869. Though F. R. H. con­sent­ed to the al­ter­a­tions in Church Hymns, she thought the orig­in­al more strict­ly car­ried out the idea of the mot­to, “I gave My life for thee, What hast thou done for Me?”

Frances Ha­ver­gal her­self said about this hymn:

I was so over­whelmed on Sun­day at hear­ing three of my hymns touch­ing­ly sung in Per­ry Church, that I ne­ver be­fore real­ized the high priv­i­lege of writ­ing for the “great con­gre­ga­tion,” es­pe­cial­ly when they sang, “I gave My life for thee” to my fa­ther’s tune Baca.

This hymn was re­cast in 1871 in Church Hymns, under the ti­tle “Thy Life Was Giv­en for Me”: