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Sunday, September 6, 2026 

by Joshua L. Mazur, Director of Music 

Hymn 657: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling 

This Sunday we sing one of the best-known hymns of Charles Wesley, the eighteenth-century Anglican priest and hymn writer whose work, together with that of his brother John, became inseparable from the Methodist revival. Charles wrote several thousand hymns, including Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, and Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies. His hymns are particularly good examples of the old idea that hymnody is theology sung. Wesley could put quite a lot of doctrine into a text and still make it something a congregation would actually want to sing. 

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling was first published in 1747. Its subject is sanctification, the continuing work of God's grace in making us holy. Wesley begins with Christ Himself: 

“Love divine, all loves excelling, 

joy of heaven, to earth come down.” 

The identification of Christ with divine love gives us the premise for everything that follows. The love Wesley wants to see perfected in us has its origin in God. Christ comes to us, dwells in us, and changes us so that we may increasingly resemble Him. 

This was especially important to Wesley's theology. John and Charles Wesley taught that salvation includes more than forgiveness, though certainly never less than forgiveness. The grace that forgives us also begins the lifelong work of changing us. Wesley sometimes described the end of that process as Christian perfection, which can sound rather alarming until we understand what he meant by it. He was not imagining Christians who never make mistakes. He meant perfection in love: the restoration of the human heart so that love of God and neighbor increasingly orders the whole of life. 

That is what we are praying for throughout this hymn. Wesley asks Christ to “visit us with thy salvation,” to “enter every trembling heart,” and finally to “finish, then, thy new creation.” By the final stanza, the work begun in us here has reached its completion in the presence of God. 

HYFRYDOL 

The tune we sing was not written for Wesley's words. HYFRYDOL was composed nearly a century later, in 1844, by the Welsh musician Rowland Hugh Prichard, who was only nineteen years old. The Welsh name Hyfrydol means something like “pleasant” or “delightful.” 

This is another useful example of something we have discussed before in Spotlight on Hymnody: hymns are texts, and hymn tunes have histories of their own. Wesley's Love Divine has been sung to several tunes, and HYFRYDOL has carried several different texts. A hymnal can bring the two together, and sometimes a particular marriage becomes so successful that generations of worshipers come to hear one whenever they encounter the other. 

HYFRYDOL is particularly well suited to congregational singing. It covers a fair amount of musical ground, but much of that movement happens by step, and its phrases have a natural rise and fall that make the melody easy to follow. The second half also gives us enough familiar musical material from the first that the tune becomes relatively easy to remember. It is a warm, expansive tune, which suits Wesley's text very well. 

Love Is the Fulfilling of the Law 

This hymn is especially fitting for this Sunday's appointed Scriptures. St. Paul writes in Romans, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” and then gathers several of the commandments under the familiar command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” His conclusion is wonderfully concise: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” 

The Gospel makes that considerably more concrete. Jesus gives His disciples instructions about what to do when one member of the Church sins against another. Go and speak to the person directly. If that does not work, take one or two others. If necessary, bring the matter before the Church. 

It is worth noticing that Jesus assumes there will be disagreements among Christians. People will hurt one another. Relationships within the Church will sometimes become difficult. The answer He gives is neither to pretend that nothing happened nor immediately to write the other person off. He gives His disciples a process intended to tell the truth and, if possible, restore the relationship. 

That makes an important companion to Paul's teaching about love. “Love your neighbor” can remain a fairly pleasant idea until the neighbor in question has actually wronged you. 

Wesley's hymn asks God to form in us the kind of love that can survive contact with actual people. 

If love is the fulfilling of the law, we need more than instruction to love one another. We need God's grace to make us capable of doing it. We ask Christ to dwell within us and continue His work until what we profess with our lips becomes increasingly visible in the way we live with one another. 

There is another connection worth noticing. The first lesson gives us the Passover, when Israel is preparing to leave slavery in Egypt. Wesley's hymn is also concerned with freedom, though of another sort. He asks Christ to “take away the love of sinning” and make His people what God intends them to be. The Christian understanding of salvation includes both rescue and transformation. God brings His people out, and then teaches them how to live as His people. 

As you sing Love Divine, All Loves Excelling this Sunday, notice how much of the hymn remains unfinished business. Wesley is continually asking God to keep working: enter, deliver, return, finish, complete. 

We sing it as people already loved by God and still being changed by that love. 

As you sing, consider this question: 

Where in my life does the love of Christ still have some work to do?