O The Deep Deep Love Of Jesus

Selah keeps Samuel Trevor Francis's nineteenth-century hymn text intact, and the opening image reaches for scale rather than intimacy first: "vast unmeasured, boundless, free! Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me." Love gets described here as something overwhelming before it gets described as personal.

The second verse turns from scale to permanence: "how He loveth, ever loveth, changeth never, nevermore." The hymn isn't just claiming love is big; it's claiming the size doesn't shrink over time.

"How for them He intercedeth, watcheth o'er them from the throne" borrows directly from the picture of Christ as the one who lives to intercede for those who come to him, and Paul's prayer that believers would grasp a love that surpasses knowledge gives the hymn's opening claim its exact shape — love too large to fully measure, sung about anyway. The closing line, "it lifts me up to glory, for it lifts me up to Thee," treats the ocean-sized love not as a static fact but as something actively carrying the singer somewhere.