John 3:16, with an air from the county of Londonderry

I ran across the following lyrics in an online blog comment. I did not know the source or who wrote the words. When I first searched, I found the words in a book called Echoes of Grace (Addison, IL: Bible Truth Publishers, 1951), but it was uncredited.

For God so loved
The world; I find it written,
In verse sixteen
John’s Gospel chapter three.
He gave his son
Who was for sinners smitten
When nailed upon
The cross at Calvary.

Such wondrous love,
It passes human knowledge,
That Jesus died
That we might ever live;
Eternal Life
That none need ever perish,
This Life to all believing souls he now will give.

The words are arranged to be sung to the tune Londonderry Air (or as originally transcribed by Jane Ross simply called “An Air from the County of Londonderry,” where it was heard). This tune is known to most folks as the music to the popular song, Danny Boy. We have then an air composed by an unknown composer, fused with lyrics written by an unknown author – which combine to share the Gospel message of “God so loved the world.”

As I continued to search, I found two gems – that there is a recording of this song on YouTube, and that it was included in a hymn book called The Gospel Singout (No. 54, p. 12, words only, again without attribution). These songs were sung in the Bukit Bintang Senior Sunday School at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

See here for a printed score of the Londonderry Air.

Note: As I was working on this, it struck me that the tune for the Dottie Rambo song He Looked Beyond My Fault and Saw My Need is the tune Londonderry Air. If I knew that, I had forgotten.