The Love of God

The Story Behind The Love of God

According to hymnary.org,

"Frederick M. Lehman emigrated to America with his family at age four, settling in Iowa, where he lived most of childhood. He came to Christ at age 11, as he relates:

One glad morning about eleven o’clock while walking up the country lane, skirted by a wild crab-apple grove on the right and an osage fence, with an old white-elm gate in a gap at the left, suddenly Heaven let a cornucopia of glory descend on the eleven-year-old lad. The wild crab-apple grove assumed a heavenly glow and the osage fence an unearthly luster. That old white-elm gate with its sun-warped boards gleamed and glowed like silver bars to shut out the world and shut him in with the ’form of the fourth,’ just come into his heart. The weight of conviction was gone and the paeans of joy and praise fell from his lips.

Lehman studied for the ministry at Northwestern College in Naperville, Illinois, and pastored at Audubon, Iowa; New London, Indiana; and Kansas City, Missouri. The majority of his life was devoted to writing sacred songs; his first was written while a pastor in Kingsley, Iowa, in 1898. He wrote and published hundreds of songs, and compiled five songbooks. In 1911, he moved to Kansas City, where he helped found the Nazarene Publishing House."

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