WORSHIP REFLECTIONS are weekly devotionals based on worship songs/hymns. Our hope is that this content encourages your love and adoration of Christ Jesus as you grow in closer communion with Him through personal worship.
Steven Brooks, Director of Worship Quest Ministries, presents this worship song devotional based on the hymn "The Love of God".
The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell;
it goes beyond the highest star, and reaches to the lowest hell.
The wand'ring child is reconciled by God's beloved Son.
The aching soul again made whole, and priceless pardon won.
“The Love of God” was written by Frederick Lehman in 1917. Lehman was born in Germany and emigrated to America with his family at age four. He tells a story of accepting Christ at age 11 while walking down a country road and sensing God’s powerful presence surrounding him.
Years later, while living in California working as a businessman he ended up losing everything in some business deals gone wrong. It was during this difficult time in his life that he wrote this song—The Love of God. He ended up working long days of manual labor in a Pasadena packing house packing oranges and lemons into wooden crates trying to get back on his feet. One Sunday he was so moved by a Sunday sermon on the love of God that he had trouble going to sleep. The next morning, he began writing down lyrics on scrap pieces of paper and broken crates while he was working. When he got home that evening, he began putting together the melody on his piano.
Lehman quickly penned two verses, but most songs in those days had at least three stanzas. As he struggled to find a third verse, he remembered a poem someone had given him years before. He had kept the poem on a card used as a bookmark. At the bottom of the card, Lehman found this written:
“These words were found written on a cell wall in a prison some 200 years ago. It is not known why the prisoner was incarcerated; neither is it known if the words were original or if he had heard them somewhere and had decided to put them in a place where he could be reminded of the greatness of God’s love – whatever the circumstances, he wrote them on the wall of his prison cell. In due time, he died and the men who had the job of repainting his cell were impressed by the words. Before their paint brushes had obliterated them, one of the men jotted them down and thus they were preserved.”
We now know that these words are from the pen of an eleventh-century Jewish poet in Germany named Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai.
Amazingly, the poem Lehman found fit the melody he had just written, and he had found his third verse!
Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made;
were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill, and ev’ryone a scribe by trade;
to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry;
nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.
The Christian journey begins with the recognition that you are unconditionally and irrevocably loved by God just as you are. Whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done in the course of your life, you are already loved and accepted.
When thinking of how pure and strong and deep His love is, ones mind can’t help but be drawn tot he words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 8,
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”
And “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.' No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As I read these words I desperately want us to believe the depth of their truth, but often we find a great disconnect between our heads and our hearts. But rest assured, the truth is that if we were to fill the ocean with ink and use that ink to write God’s love on the sky we wouldn’t have enough ocean to do so. Nor could we find enough sky to contain the words. This is amazing. This is the Father’s love for us.
Nothing could ever separate us from this love. Nothing. I long for each of us to know this deeply, to experience this richly, and to share this love freely with the World.
O love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—the saints’ and angels’ song.
— Steven Brooks, Director, Worship Quest Ministries