The Love of God

Praise the Lord! Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever.

Psalm 106:1

This hymn was written in a citrus packing house in Pasadena, California, by a German-born man named Frederick M. Lehman. At age four, Frederick and his family had immigrated to America, settling down in Iowa. Frederick's greatest love was gospel music, and he compiled five songbooks and published hundreds of songs.

In 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 stubby pencil.

Arriving 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:

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 though stretched from sky to sky.

That verse 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. One of his most popular gospel songs, now outdated and forgotten, was based on the wonder of a new-fangled invention that was sweeping over America. It was called "The Royal Telephone."

Central's never "busy," always on the line;

You may hear from heaven almost any time....

Telephone to glory, O what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line....

Taken from the book: Then Sings My Soul