I love Thee, I love Thee, I love Thee, my Lord;
I love Thee, my Savior, I love Thee, my God;
I love Thee, I love Thee, and that Thou dost know;
But how much I love Thee my actions will show.
(I Love Thee, from folk sources, arr. Jeremiah Ingalls, 1805)
Some of the story of the simple hymn, I Love Thee, can be readily known. I wish I could know more about its composition. The hymn lyrics first appeared in print in 1801. Words and music were published in 1805 in The Christian Harmony, a collection of hymns gathered by a popular church musician in New England. I Love Thee is the only hymn from the book still in regular use today. It is a simple, joyous hymn expressing solid, confident faith in Christ.
I could be reading more into the construction of the first verse of the hymn than the anonymous author intended. The phrase “I love thee” is repeated seven times in the first three lines. This jubilant repetition may indicate how freely the singer is moved to profess his or her love for the Lord. How wonderful to love the Lord and to declare that love over and over. But . is there more to the story? The profession of love is made seven times (a complete number?), but those assertions seem to me to be called into question by the last line: “But how much I love thee my actions will show.”
Love truly is a verb. Genuine love is more than a mere declaration in words. Saying “I love .” can spill lightly from our lips, but acting for the good of another regardless of the cost to oneself is the real measure of love. We can say or sing how much we love the Lord with self-satisfying ease until the last line calls us to account: “But how much I love thee my actions will show.” I like to think that the hymn writer meant to jar singers with the too frequent disparity between our words and our actions.
Love seems to me to be the essential force animating a cycle of relationship with God. Of course, the whole cycle is set in motion by God’s very nature and his actions on our behalf. As John says: “God is love.. We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:16a, 19 NIV) Our professions of love and – more importantly – our love in action are responses to God demonstrating his love for us in all of creation and in his personal care for us. God’s love calls for a continual cycle of loving response in three stages.
First, we are to respond to God’s love by loving God back. When Jesus states the “first and greatest commandment,” he quotes the foundational rule for relating with God from Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” (Mark 12:30 NCV) Israel’s prophets reiterated that loving God was much less a matter of conducting worship services and performing ritual sacrifices than it was practicing God’s kind of justice, mercy, and compassion.
Truly loving God should produce in us the second stage of the cycle of love, loving one another. Initially, we learn to act lovingly toward brothers and sisters in the family of faith in God. In an intimate moment with his disciples, Jesus called for them (and for us) to love fellow followers of his way: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34 NIV) Early followers of Jesus practiced hospitality toward one another, shared burdens and supported each other, and encouraged and cared for one another. They loved each other so actively and with such integrity that the surrounding culture took notice. An early Christian leader observed: “‘Look,’ they say, ‘how they love one another’ (for they themselves hate one another); and ‘how they are ready to die for each other’ (for they themselves are readier to kill each other).” (Tertullian, Apology, 39.7, ca. A.D. 200) Indeed, their actions toward one another did show how much they loved the Lord.
This leads to the third stage in the cycle of love, loving everyone everywhere. This kind of love was intended by God from the beginning of the Law: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18b NCV) Jesus left no conditions for not loving everyone: “love your enemies. Pray for those who hurt you.” (Matthew 5:44 NCV) Our love for everyone follows God’s pattern of love for everyone, no matter what: “God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so very much, {5} that even while we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s [grace] that you have been saved!)” (Ephesians 2:4-5 NLT) Loving all others carries the hope of reconciling them with God, so that they recognize how God began the whole thing by loving all of us and creating us for loving relationship with himself. When other people respond to God’s love in personal faith and their own demonstrations of love for God, the cycle is complete and ready to start again.
The crucial element is going beyond mere verbal professions of love for God to practice love so actively that it can’t escape notice. This is the life God intends for us to live. Out of your love for God, what loving actions have you done today?
The third verse too often is omitted from traditional hymn singing, but it should be included when singing I Love Thee. It sums up the resulting faith the active practice of God’s kind of love should produce in us:
O Jesus, my Savior, with Thee I am blessed. My life and salvation, my joy and my rest.
Thy Name be my theme, and Thy love be my song; Thy grace shall inspire both my heart and my tongue.
- J. Edward Culpepper
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