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“O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” By Samuel Trevor Francis
“O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”
By Samuel Trevor Francis, 1875
Arrangement by The Basics
Sample Music:
Lyrics:
O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus by Samuel Trevor Francis, 1875
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me
Underneath me, all around me
Is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward
To my glorious rest above
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Spread His praise from shore to shore
How He loveth, ever loveth
Changeth never, nevermore
How He watches o’er His loved ones
Died to call them all His own
How for them He intercedeth
Watches over them from the throne
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Love of every love the best
‘Tis an ocean vast of blessing
‘Tis a haven sweet of rest
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
‘Tis a heaven of heavens to me
And it lifts me up to glory
For it lifts me up to Thee
My wife and I attend Asbury Temple United Methodist Church, an historically black United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina. But while I’m still in training to be a pastor, we visit other churches once a month to worship with our brothers and sisters in the faith and to see what the Spirit is doing in their worship and life together. There is a local Emerging Church that meets in a storefront in Downtown Durham called Emmaus Way. My wife has spoken at an Emerging conference, but I have not had much experience with them. We decided it was time to go for a visit.
There were several things about this church that caused my wife and me to reflect further upon what worship is and how we worship, but I’ll stick to the music, since that’s this website’s real focus. The thing that was immediately obvious was that we weren’t participating in a show or performance while we were singing. We were sitting semi-circle and there was one worship leader with a guitar sitting on a stool with his back (or side) to us. It reminded me of visiting Mars Hill in Grand Rapids where the sanctuary is in the round and the band all faces inward toward the cross at the center of the “round.” The band members closest to you have their back to you. You can see the faces of the band members on the other side of the round, but only as “obscured” by the cross (not a bad symbol for how we ought to see one another). Emmaus Way had a similar feel, but much smaller and more intimate.
We had worship sheets with lyrics handed to us when we walked in, and the worship leader began finger picking his way through the first song. It was a beautiful but unfamiliar melody. As I flipped to the page with the lyrics for this song, I noticed first the title, “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus.” Sounded like any contemporary praise chorus. Next, I noticed the artist’s name, Samuel Trevor Francis. I hadn’t heard of this guy. His name sounds a little formal. Maybe he’s part of the recent wave of British worship music making its way across the pond. But then something made me stop in my mental tracks. I noticed the date, 1875. We were about to sing a hymn. The style of the music up to this point had not clued me in to the fact that we were about to sing lyrics that had been sung for 100+ years. My attention focused and I became open to the grace of the Spirit at work bringing together the old and the new, the ancient and the future in that worship service.
There are several worthwhile points about the lyrics of this song. It seems to be based heavily on the end of Romans 8, a wonderful chapter of scripture on which to base any worship song. Perhaps the eighth chapter and even the entire book reach its climax with the last two verses: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:38-39). You can almost hear the readers of Paul’s letter respond with the declaration, “O the deep, deep love of Jesus!”
And yet, here in these lyrics that are over a hundred years old, we find some similar tendencies and weaknesses that are present in today’s modern praise music which suggests for better or worse that these issues are much deeper than modern praise music. I’m not entirely certain that this song is based on Romans 8, but if it is, then Francis has, as is so often the case today, changed the first person plural pronouns (“us” and “we”) to singular (“me”) in most instances. Although he does not always do so. In the second verse we get:
How He watches o’er His loved ones
Died to call them all His own
How for them He intercedeth
Watches over them from the throne
It is here that Francis finds the balance that so many songs lack today. Life in Christ is both a personal life and a communal life. It is both “me and Jesus” and “Jesus and us.” Jesus calls individuals to be part of his body, the church. Life in Christ cannot live or thrive apart from the fullness of the body. Christ died for me and for us. To focus singularly on “me” is to neglect the broad scope of God’s work reconciling all the world to God.
While Francis’ original lyrics held this balance between “me” and “us”, The Basics have succumbed to the temptation to turn the last two instances of “them” to “me.” We can forgive them for doing so because they have added a couple of instances of “us” earlier in the same verse where Francis does not have them. In the end, I would recommend retaining Francis’ original lyrics mixed with the instances of “us” inserted by The Basics, a change you may make because the lyrics are in the public domain.
While the lyrics are commendable, what particularly impressed me about this song was the arrangement. I have often thought and wished that someone would tap into the theologically rich lyrics of our tradition’s hymnody and arrange old favorites so that they are more culturally appropriate for a new generation. Here in this arrangement I found that rich tradition of our hymns being sung as both an old song and a new song. And I would not have noticed we were singing a hymn had the song sheet not let the secret out by printing the date next to the composer’s name.
Conclusion: Highly Recommended
There is even more theological depth in these lyrics than I have had space to reflect on here. I have wanted to focus more on the arrangement. Because of the two working together, I highly recommend this song for worship. There are no printed arrangement sheets, so you’ll have to pick up a used CD from the link above or another of your favorite CD stores and make the arrangement by ear as best as you can (and if you are so musically talented as to score out the arrangement, I’d love to have a copy). The CD is by The Basics and the album is The Canticle of Turning. I think The Basics have done an excellent job of turning these theologically rich lyrics into a modern canticle of praise.
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