Loved with Everlasting Love

“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” ~John 13:1

The Scotsman George Matheson was born in Glasgow in 1842. After graduating from Glasgow University at age 19, Matheson made preparations for pastoral ministry. During this time, however, tragedy struck. His eyesight started deteriorating and by the age of 20 he was completely blind. What compounded this devastating providence was that his fiancée broke off their engagement to be married, stating, “I don’t want to be the wife of a blind man.”

Remarkably, Matheson, though blind, went on to have a fruitful ministry spanning many years, at one time even preaching before Queen Victoria! Nonetheless, Matheson knew the pain of loneliness and heartache. When he was 40 years old, the depths of his loneliness and heartache were accentuated by the marriage of his caregiver sister. He described that very day: “I was alone at the manse at that time. It was the night of my sister’s marriage ... Something happened to me which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering.” In the throes of heartache rekindled by the memory of his fiancée’s retracted love, he wrote a hymn. He said, “My hymn was composed in the manse of Innellan on the evening of June 6, 1882, when I was 40 years of age … I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.”

Matheson’s hymn, number 708 in our hymnal, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” speaks not of the inconsistent, rollercoaster love we have for each other, but rather the immutable love of God that is everlasting. It reminds us of the God who said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3). It reminds us of Jesus who loved His people so much – so inexhaustibly – that He came from the glory of heaven to the hell of Golgotha, in order to die for me and save me for Himself. Christian, do you believe in, are you resting in, the everlasting love God has for you?    

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee.
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.

O Light that follows all my way,
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee.
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
may brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee.
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain,
that morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee.
I lay in dust, life’s glory dead,
and from the ground there blossoms red,
life that shall endless be.

Rev. Rob Dykes, Pastor of Preaching & Congregational Care