To Make a Wretch His Treasure: Reflections on How Deep the Father’s Love for Us

He sat down in 1995 determined to write a hymn. He was a worship leader in Brighton, burdened by the shallowness of much contemporary Christian song, convinced that the church needed something with the theological weight of the great tradition. His first attempt became one of the most widely sung modern hymns in the world.Stuart Townend's "How Deep the Father's Love for Us" does what the best hymns have always done: it directs the congregation's attention away from itself and toward the God who acted. It begins with the Father's incomprehensible love - vast beyond all measure, proven by the giving of the only Son. It moves to the cost of that giving: the Father's face turned away as the Chosen One's wounds bring many sons to glory. And then it arrives at the most honest moment in any passion hymn written in the last fifty years - the singer hears her own voice among the mockers, sees her own sin on the Savior's shoulders, and is left with one question and one answer. Why should I gain from His reward? I cannot. I will not boast in anything - no gifts, no power, no wisdom - but Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection.To Make a Wretch His Treasure is the eighteenth volume in the Songs of the Redeemed series. Moving phrase by phrase through Townend's three stanzas, Elias Hartwell traces the full arc of the Reformed doctrine of the atonement - penal substitution, the finished work, the particular love - in the idiom of a modern hymn that stands fully in the tradition of Watts and Cowper and Wesley.For the soul who has sung this hymn and never pressed into what it is actually claiming about the cross - and about them -The love is vast. The cost was real. And the wretch has been made His treasure.