‘Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus’ uses ocean metaphor to show Christ’s love

“Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” written in 1898 by Samuel Trevor Francis, has been sung in other Christian churches to different tunes over the years and is now in “Hymns for Home and Church” of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with a new melody.

Francis was born in Cheshunt, England, in 1834 and became a poet and a lay preacher. When he was compiling the volume of poetry that included the text of “Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” Francis became afflicted with partial blindness. Despite the darkness in his vision, he hoped his poetry would “show how light, hope and joy may be found,” explains ”About the Hymns” on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.

An article in The Christian magazine said about Francis, “All his poetical work, as well as his spoken word, was permeated by a realisation of the love of Christ, and with a heart’s desire to see the Saviour’s face.” Francis died at age 92 in 1925.

Stephen M. Jones, who has been serving on the music editorial team of the Church’s hymnbook committee, said the team looked at this hymn to consider whether it could be included in the Church’s new global hymnbook. But Jones wondered if perhaps a new tune might better fit the message of the hymn’s words.

The words describe how Christ’s divine love is deep, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free — it is “rolling as a mighty ocean” and “an ocean vast of blessing.” Singers “spread His praise from shore to shore.”

The structure of the beats in the most popular tune seemed heavy; almost punishing, Jones said, who is a professor of composition in the School of Music at Brigham Young University. He envisioned something different to match how Francis used the ocean metaphor in every verse.

“I wanted this sense of flowing nature. So to make it flow, one of the ways you do that is to move the bass,” Jones said. “The way the lines move are an attempt, especially in the last couple of phrases, to let the music have a sense of flow up and then down.”

Sometimes the composition process is agonizing, Jones said, but not this time. “I just sat down one day and I kind of heard an initial idea and sketched it out very quickly and finished it off shortly thereafter.”

The hymnbook committee considered several compositions before choosing Jones’ tune, and they honed it to make the best melodic form and singable form, he said.

The hymn was added to “Hymns for Home and Church” in the September 2024 release. A youth choir from northern Utah sang the hymn in April 2025 general conference with an arrangement by Geoff Anderson, who also directed the choir.

Anderson spoke about the experience in a report on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.

“There’s a lot of really great inspiration going into choosing these hymns for the new hymn book,” he said. “We’d hit rehearsals, and we’d be working, working, working, and I’d say, pull out ‘Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,’ and there was an audible, ‘I love this one,’ and [the youth] connected immediately.”

Earlier this year, Jones and his wife traveled to Europe for some music-related research. The first Sunday they were there, they walked into a chapel in Paris, France, where Jones said he was delighted to see that the congregation would be singing two new hymns that day.

“The sense that that gives you as a hymn committee member, as an editing committee member, you’ve been working for years on this project, and to see them used internationally has just been such a rewarding and touching thing,” Jones said.

The next weekend, the Joneses were in Germany, where Jones had served as a young full-time missionary. The Joneses attended a Saturday evening stake conference meeting with a woman Jones and his companion had taught and baptized years before. A hymn that had been chosen for that meeting was “Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” in German.

He said that moment, even more deeply than the experience in Paris, showed him, “This is a global church and we are working on a global hymnbook.”