Loved with everlasting love,
led by grace that love to know;
gracious Spirit from above,
Thou hast taught me it is so!
O this full and precious peace!
O this transport all divine!
In a love which cannot cease,
I am his and he is mine.
Heav’n above is deeper blue;
earth around is sweeter green;
something lives in ev’ry hue
Christless eyes have never seen.
Birds with gladder songs o’erflow;
Flow’rs with deeper beauties shine;
Since I know, as now I know,
I am his and he is mine.
His forever, only his!
Who the Lord and me shall part?
Ah, with what a rest of bliss
Christ can fill the loving heart!
Heav’n and earth may fade and flee,
firstborn light in gloom decline;
But while God and I shall be,
I am his and he is mine.
George Wade Robinson (1838-1876)
A few days after becoming a Christian, someone asked me how I was feeling. Not knowing exactly what I should say, I replied, ‘I feel I’ve come home.’ In many ways, this hymn fills out what I meant. I had come home, not to a place but to a person. As the hymn says, ‘I am his, and he is mine.’
The Lord’s everlasting love
The hymn is rich in meaning, spanning new birth to the new heaven and new earth. It is a reminder of the Lord’s mercy and grace, pointing me to my Creator; it assures me of his everlasting love.
I am his because he first loved me. Before the creation of the world, he chose me, adopted me, and now calls me to live life with him and for him. This is God’s plan of redemption. The Father rescues us through the work of the Son he loves, and the Spirit teaches us that it is so. God saves and keeps to the end!
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:9-10).
Since I am his, I now see creation with new eyes. The softer blues, the sweeter greens, the gladder songs and the deeper beauties of a world created and sustained by the One who knows me and loves me.
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens… When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? (Ps. 8:1, 3-4).
I am his forever. Nothing can separate me from his love. God is who he says he is, and will do what he says he will do.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38-39).
Living in his love
I don’t always live out all of these truths. For now, I live with the tension of the ‘now and not yet’. I rejoice in him, and yet I am prone to wander from him. One day, it will be all rejoicing, and rejoicing forever.
How do we live with him and for him? We do it together. We are his chosen people and his special possession. Let’s keep reminding one another of the mercy and grace shown to us in and through the Son. Let’s keep pointing one another to our Creator God, and let’s keep encouraging one another to keep going, and all the more as the day approaches (Heb. 10:25).
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2).
