Name Of Love

Israel Houghton's “Name Of Love” introduces a series of friends who are looking for something they do not have. One friend likes to win and sees life as a strategy, chases dreams, but has a hole in his soul and searches for significance in emptiness. The line that follows sums it up: everybody needs love.

A second friend is very thin and thinks life is about appearances. She measures herself by images on a screen, the hair and the clothes, and compares herself with someone else. The answer in both cases is the chorus: come in the name of love. The third friend is the closest one, who sees your life as wonderful and worth dying for, more than enough, offering living water that quenches thirst for good. A closing section says that humanity is reaching for something real and that history is crying out to feel it, all we need. The tone is warm and conversational, and the song speaks to people in the pews and the ones outside. It suits an outreach event, a youth service or a time when a church wants to remind itself that its main business is to carry love to people who feel empty. The portraits are brief but honest, so a listener can find themselves in one of the friends and hear that the same offer is made to them.

Living water that satisfies is John 4:13-14. Loving because he first loved us is 1 John 4:19, and seeking the lost is Luke 19:10.