A couple of years back, this song “How He Loves” surfaced. Written by John Mark McMillan, I actually heard a version from Eddie Kirkland first. I was immediately in love with it. The poetry and imagery were strong and beautiful. The message was inspiring. As a guy who really struggles to believe how much God loves me, it was very refreshing for me to listen to. However, then I began to hear it being used all over in corporate worship settings and I was frankly very concerned.

I always strive to maintain a Christ-centered, gospel-centered approach to my worship leadership. If the glory of Christ and the cross are not the focus of our songs and the thrust of everything we are presenting in a corporate worship gathering, it’s all pointless. As a result, it’s been incredibly easy for me to gravitate toward the truth that Jesus died for His glory, but unfortunately, it’s often been at the expense of believing it was out of His love for us as well. I regrettably have almost fostered a distaste for singing about God’s love for us in a corporate worship setting. I want to focus on His glory, sovereignty, power and other manly type topics.

But no matter how much I struggle to exalt these incredible attributes of God, the fact of this strong biblical truth remains: that He demonstrated His love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. His love for His creation was indeed quite a motivator for His crusade to conquer sin, even become sin on our behalf, so that He might impute His righteousness to us. We cannot leave this out of the story we present in worship in our churches; it MUST inform the way we worship and plan for leading worship.

Bryan Chapell, in his book, “Christ-Centered Worship” says,

“Worship is not only for God’s glory, and it is not only for our good. In order for the gospel to be good news for God’s people it must have both goals, and worship that is reflective of the gospel must also have both goals… Making God’s glory the exclusive goal of worship sounds very reverent, but actually fails to respect Scripture’s own gospel priorities.”

He goes on to say,

“The vertical, heaven directed aspects of worship do not require us to ignore human concerns. In fact, praising God without acknowledging His love for His people would make our worship incomplete… In order for our worship to minister God’s goodness to His people, we must have a means to reflect His love in our liturgy.”

God has done a complete 180 in my heart toward “How He Loves.” I used to question its appropriateness in a congregational worship setting, but now I question how one can corporately worship without addressing the great love with which He has loved us. One of the most man-centered things we could do is ignore the very love God gave His son to display. He glories in His own love enough to call Himself Love. If we ignore that, we ignore a large portion of who God chooses to identify Himself as.

However, keeping a Christ-centered view of God’s love in singing this song must always and unwaveringly be our goal. Our Savior is who we are singing to, and who our affections are being directed at. He is the subject of the song. It is His love… We must not make the mistake of exalting ourselves as the subjects of the song, as could potentially be our tendency in any type of worship. That’s why a good worship leader will shepherd people away from that idolatry by keeping the focus on Christ’s character and work.

At this juncture, I must point out that the song does not ever specifically mention Christ, or the cross. This does not make it unusable… many songs never make mention specifically of those things. It does, however, incline the worship leader to insert a rubric of some sort as an introduction to the song, pointing out that the ultimate sacrifice and infinite cost Christ paid on the cross was the full demonstration of His love for us.

Christ is absolutely everything! He is the subject of the song, and object of our affection and His great love with which He has loved us ought to spur our hearts toward a lively worship and affection for Him because of who He is and all He has done.

I will be planning and using “How He Loves” in my worship sets…

Grace and peace,
Stephen Miller