ODB: Limitless Love
February 23, 2014
READ: Psalm 36
Your mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens; Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. —Psalm 36:5
Recently, a friend sent me the history of a hymn that I often heard in church when I was a boy:
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.
These words are part of an ancient Jewish poem and were once found on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum.
Also, Frederick M. Lehman was so moved by the poem that he desired to expand on it. In 1917, while seated on a lemon box during his lunch break from his job as a laborer, he added the words of the first two stanzas and the chorus, completing the song “The Love of God.”
The psalmist describes the comforting assurance of God’s love in Psalm 36: “Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens” (v.5 esv). Regardless of the circumstances of life—whether in a moment of sanity in a mind otherwise muddled with confusion or during a dark time of trial—God’s love is a beacon of hope, our ever-present, inexhaustible source of strength and confidence.
— Joe Stowell
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure,
The saints’ and angels’ song. —Lehman
You are loved with everlasting love.
Source: Our Daily Bread