Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 17th

GOD PROVES HIS OWN LOVE

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. - 1 John 4:10

Let us think for a moment of the fact which is thus the demonstration of the love of God, and try to realise what it is that that Cross says to us, as we gaze upon the silent Sufferer meekly hanging there. I know that my words must fall far beneath the theme, but I can only hope that you will read them charitably, and try to better them for yourselves in your own thoughts.

I look, then, to the dying Christ, and I see there the revelation, because the consequence, of a love which is not called forth by any loveableness on the part of its objects. The Apostle emphasizes that thought, if we render his words fully, because he says, "God proves His own love" - a love which, like all that belongs to that timeless, self-determining Being, has its reason and its roots in Himself alone! We love because we discern the object to be loveable. God loves by what I may venture to call the very necessity of His nature. Like some artesian well that needs no pumps nor machinery to draw up the sparkling waters to flash in the sunlight, there gushes up from the depths of His own heart the love which pours over every creature that He has made. He loves because He is God.

It is only the Gospel of a dying Christ that can calm the reasonable consciousness of discord and antagonism that springs in a man’s heart when he lets his conscience speak. It is because He died for us that we are sure now that the black mountain-wall of our sin, which, to our own apprehension, rises separating between us and our God, is, if I may so say, surged over by the rising flood of His love. The Cross of Christ teaches me that, and so it is the Gospel for men that know themselves to be sinners. Is there anything else that teaches it? I know not where it is, if there be.

That dying Christ, hanging there, in the silence and the darkness of eclipse, speaks to me, too, of a Divine love which, though not turned away by man’s sin, is rigidly righteous. There is a current easy-going religion which says, "Oh! we do not want any of your Evangelical contrivances for forgiveness. God is Love. That is enough for us." I venture to say that the thing which that form of thought calls love is not love at all, but pure weakness; such as in a king or in a father would be immoral. It is not otherwise in God. My brother! unless you can find some means whereby the infinite love of God can get at and soothe the sinner’s heart without perilling God’s righteousness, you have done nothing to the purpose. Such a one-eyed, lop-sided gospel will never work, has not worked, and it never will. But, when I think of my Christ bearing the sins of the world, I say to myself, " Herein is love. By His stripes we are healed," and in Him love and righteousness are both crowned as distinctive attributes in harmonious oneness. Is there anything else that will do that? If there be, I, for one, know not what it is.