Frederick M. Lehman wrote about love, the love of God. In fact that is the title of his hymn, The Love of God. He wrote the hymn while sitting on an empty lemon crate in Pasadena California. He had pastored mostly in the Midwest but in 1917 he found himself without a church and struggling financially. He took a job at a packing company in Pasadena. He would move thirty tons of lemons and oranges each day. He loved music and one morning he had a song in his head. During a break he sat down wrote two stanzas. He went home that night and sat at his piano and the tune came to him. The problem was that he needed a third stanza. All the hymns of that day had three stanzas. He remembered a sermon he heard recently. The preacher had read a poem that fit perfectly.

Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made

Were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill

And ev’ry man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Tho’ stretched from sky to sky

The problem was he did not know who wrote these words. He used the verse anyway. Today we know that a Jewish poet in Germany who lived during the eleventh century, Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, wrote this third stanza. His words, from the eleventh century, fit perfectly with the melody Frederick wrote in the twentieth century. Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai never dreamed that a verse he wrote would be sung by thousands in a land of which he had never heard. What a beautiful expression of Gods love found in this hymn.
God uses us in many different ways; it may be today or may be 800 years from now!