Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus

Samuel Trevor Francis (1834–1925) was a London merchant who grew up singing in a parish church choir with his father and brother. But as a young man of about nineteen, his faith faltered. According to the story he later told, one stormy winter night he stood on Hungerford Bridge above the River Thames, staring down at the dark water, so overcome with despair that he was tempted to give up on life itself.

Standing there, he sensed a question form in his heart: 'You do believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?' His answer changed everything. 'I do believe,' he said, 'and I put my whole trust in Him as my Saviour.' He walked off the bridge rejoicing — 'Then I am saved!' — and spent the rest of his long life telling people about the love that had reached him at his lowest moment.

That is why the hymn pictures Christ's love as a 'vast, unmeasured, boundless' ocean, 'rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.' For Francis, the deep water beneath a London bridge had been transformed from a symbol of despair into a symbol of a love with no bottom and no shore.

Francis sold goods by day and preached in the open air by night — for seventy-three years. During the great London revival meetings of 1873–74 he even filled in as song leader for the famous hymn writer Ira Sankey. He published his poem about Christ's ocean-deep love in 1898, in a collection called Whence-Whither and Other Poems, drawing on Paul's prayer in Ephesians that we might grasp 'the breadth, and length, and depth, and height' of the love of Christ.

Late in his life, while preparing that collection, Francis was losing his eyesight. He said he wanted the poems to show that even in growing darkness, 'light, hope and joy may be found.' He died in 1925 at age ninety-one, having never stopped preaching.

For most of the twentieth century, these words were sung to a brooding Welsh tune called EBENEZER, written around 1890 by Thomas John Williams. A wonderful legend grew up around it: people said the melody had washed ashore on the Welsh coast, sealed inside a bottle — which earned it the nickname Tôn-y-Botel, 'the tune in a bottle.'

It was only a legend. A printer had published the tune without Williams's permission under that fanciful name, and later sheepishly apologized to the composer, explaining that 'it is said by everyone that it was found in a bottle at the seashore.' The story stuck anyway — some legends are simply too good to sink.

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prepared its new hymnbook, Hymns—For Home and Church, the committee loved Francis's words — but the traditional melody didn't feel right for them. So Stephen M. Jones, the BYU composition professor who has chaired the hymnbook's music editing committee since 2019, sat down and wrote a brand-new tune. 'This idea of water really struck me,' he said. 'It came really quickly.'

He named the tune DEEP LOVE, and he built the ocean right into the music: the melody and bass lines rise and fall like waves, so that singers feel the text's 'mighty ocean' rolling beneath the words. Listen to the accompaniment and you can hear it.

The hymn was released on September 12, 2024, as #1015 in the new collection — a 126-year-old text carried by a melody composed in 2023. Fittingly, Brother Jones now has a hymn in both Latter-day Saint hymnbooks: he wrote 'When Faith Endures' (#128 in the 1985 hymnal) as a graduate student.