Christian Love # 2

Christian Love # 2

In heaven, perfect love to God, and perfect love to our companions in glory, will be the consummation of our celestial happiness. We cannot rise higher, we cannot go beyond it. Imagination can neither devise nor conceive of anything richer than perfect love. What can God do more for us, than to fill us with perfect love to Himself, and to all the universe? To have a perpetual infflux from the mind, of thoughts and feelings of pure, generous, unchecked benevolence, and all these coming back again from the objects of them, in reciprocal smiles, expressions of regard, and acts of pure and perfect love!

Now, dear friends, look at love - gaze upon its lovely form, its beautiful countenance, and its graceful actings, and observe its seraphic glow, its divine temper. But look at it not only as something to be admired - but to be possessed and practiced. Unless this be your temper, you are no Christians. I do not say you cannot be Christians unless you have it in perfection - but you must have the principle, and you are Christians no further than you live under its influence.

God's eternal thoughts and purposes in election, Christ's redeeming work upon the Cross, the Spirit's omnipotent agency in regeneration, are not merely to bring us under a particular ecclesiastical regimen - but to deliver us from the dominion of selfishness, and place us under the reign of love, and thus make us like God! 

And now, my dear friends, let me entreat you to examine yourselves  concerning this great essential of the Christian character. Are you experimentally acquainted with this disposition? Is this your religion? Is  your temper thus molded? Through faith in Christ, and by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, are you brought to love God for His own sake, and man for God's sake? Is that one word love characteristic of your spirit? Have you a tie that binds you to the whole human race, and creates a propensity to promote universal happiness? Has God's love to you changed you into its own likeness? Do you know what it is to have pride, passion, envy, malice, selfishness, if not wholly eradicated, yet subdued, repressed, resisted, by a meek, gentle, lowly, forgiving, forbearing, candid generous, self-denying temper? Are the harshness, hardness, asperity of the fallen nature, displaced by the softness, sweetness, and kindness of true love?

Cultivate this disposition. You have all to little of it. Remember, it is absolutely and indispensably essential. It is not a mere circumstantial - but a fundamental. You can no more be Christians without love, than you can be without chastity, or justice, or truth. It is not a mere decoration of the Christian character - but part of the substance of it. You can have no faith without love, for "faith works by love." You cannot be born of the Spirit without love, for "the fruit of the Spirit is love." The whole law is fulfilled in one word, LOVE. You have not the image of God without love, for "God is love." You have no fitness for heaven without love, for heaven is perfect love. You must have this grace, or you can never be saved.

Take great pains to obtain love. Without effort, you will never have Christian love. You must watch, wrestle, and pray. Love is a plant of paradise, which cannot incessant care, and without placing it by faith and prayer under the warm beams of the Sun of righteousness, and the dew of the Holy Spirit. Unless our heart be set upon it, and we treat it as the gardener does some favorite flower, which he is anxious to raise up to strength and beauty, we shall never succeed. Love is a grace which the man of the world neglects, and which many professing Christians think far too little about; but it is of infinite value in the eyes of God. Let us feel that love is our vocation, for which we are set apart by both redeeming and regenerating grace.

We should often meditate on the love of God, and of Christ, to us. We must steadily contemplate the God of love bending in the attitude of a benevolence over a world in rebellion against Him; and we must visit the Cross daily to see the bleeding, dying love of Christ. The enmities of our nature wither, and all the charities revive and flourish, by the influence of meditation on the love of God.

How earnestly should we pray for that Spirit, whose first and richest fruit is love. It is His to bless our labors; His to render our efforts successful. Love is peace, and peace is bliss. Love is the calm and sunshine of the bosom. Your looks will beam affection, your lips drop words of kindness - you will, in short, be as a tree of life. It is a seraph, a ministering angel,sent forth from the Father of mercies, to reveal to men His nature, and to fit them for His presence.

Love is the most characteristic feature of Christ's image in a renewed man. Love is the most precious fruit of grace; and yet the fruit which too many of His professed followers seem to think themselves hardly under any obligation to cultivate. Yes, love is the image, as well as the law of our Divine Lord - and not human systems and forms of government.

It is love, which must form the bond of union between all the followers of Christ, the principle of a universal fellowship of saints, and the glory of the church - even as it will form the sweet and everlasting cement of souls in heaven!

~John Angell James~

(The End)