08/21/11

The Love of God.

It is profound.

It is more than we can imagine.

Even when we are at our worst, God loves us... and even still likes us.

This was sung at church today.  Here is the story behind the song.

The Love of God

F.M. Lehman

This hymn was written in a citrus packing house in Pasadena, California, by a German-born Christian named Frederick M. Lehman.  At age four, Frederick and his family had immigrated to America, settling down in Iowa.  Converted to Christ at age eleven while walking through a crabapple orchard, Frederick eventually entered the ministry and pastored churches in the Midwest.  But his greatest love was gospel music, and he compiled five songbooks and published hundreds of songs.

By 1917, his finances had gone sour, and he found himself working in a packing factory in Pasadena, moving thirty tons of lemons and oranges a day.  One morning as he arrived at work, a song was forming in his mind.  He had been thinking about the limitlessness of God's love, and during breaks he sat on an empty lemon crate and jotted down words with a stuffy pencil.

Arriving at home that evening, he went to the old upright piano and began putting notes to his words.  He finally had a melody and two stanzas, but almost all gospel songs of that era had at least three stanzas.  At length, he thought of some lines he had recently heard in a sermon.

That verse [he had heard] perfectly formed the third stanza, but who had written it?  As Frederick heard the story, it was composed on the wall of an insane asylum by an unknown inmate.  Perhaps someone did find it there, but we now know the words originally came from the pen of an eleventh-century Jewish poet in Germany named Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai.  

Frederick lived the rest of his life in California, writing a number of hymns before his death in 1953.  

~Then Sings My Soul by Robert J. Morgan

Here is the first and third stanza to that song.  Oh, how true it is!

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 guilty pair, bowed down with care,

God gave His Son to win;

His erring child He reconciled

And pardoned from his sin.

Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade.

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry,

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Tho stretched from sky to sky.