I learned it as a young boy.  Very young.  I couldn’t tell you who taught it to me.  Mom? Dad? Grandma?  Church?  Who would have thought it would become the deepest and most profound truth of my life, the foundation stone upon which everything else rests?

“Jesus loves me, this I know…”

In his book Repenting of Religion, Gregory Boyd says, “Our one need is to simply be people who are loved for free, who are filled with love for free, and who therefore love all other people for free.”  In our search for truth, a search every human being is on whether they know it or not, we are often sidetracked by the misguided need for words, ideas, or systems of belief that have a beyond us sort of feel…an esoteric maxim, a PhD dissertation. Certainly we aren’t looking for a Sunday School song.

We shouldn’t be surprised at the simplicity of it all.  But I have been.  Perhaps you have fallen into the same trap.  My search for assumed complexity misses the glory and richness of the simple.  Eyes for the future cost me the power of the present.  The ticket into the kingdom is childlikeness.  A Sunday School song.

I have, however, had to change some of the lyrics.  I came to a place where “for the Bible tells me so” didn’t cut it anymore.  It wasn’t enough.  God’s love is God’s love not because the Bible says so, but because it has been, as Paul says in Romans, “shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit.”  I know Jesus loves me not because a book (as wonderful a book as it is) tells me so, but because I have experienced His love at the core of my being.  My heart knows it to be true. His love changed my life, healed my soul, and impassioned me.

I experienced it.

With no disrespect for the original version, I sing it a bit differently now.

Jesus loves me, this I know
Because I’ve felt the overflow
No longer words upon a page
But living love, the words replaced
No evil deed nor darkest day
Could ever take that love away
Jesus loves me, this I know
I know, I know
His love, I know