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‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.’
Luk_10:27
I. How is personal love possible?—But some one may say, ‘How is this to be won? How is a personal devotion to, and affection for, God at all possible?’ Surely the answer is plain. When in the impulse of a similar doubt the Apostle Philip exclaimed to his Master, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,’ we note the Divine reply: ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’ The Incarnation has revealed to us the possibility of loving God with all our hearts. ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ It may be with you and with me just as it was with Mary Magdalene, when she poured that precious ointment upon His Head. It was the expression of a faith intensely personal. He asks for our personal love on the ground that we have no such Friend in the world, ‘the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’
II. Love’s constraining power.—When St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians these inspiring words, ‘the love of Christ constraineth me,’ he meant not the love that he felt for Christ, but the love which Christ felt for him. His own love was no doubt consequent upon that, a mere matter of course about which he cared not to speak, so inferior a thing did it seem to him. It was the Master’s care for him, for others, for a world steeped in misery and degradation, that seized upon his very soul, that called forth all his energies, that explained everything in his devoted career.
III. Love the root of Christian character.—Let me ask one other question, for the answer to it shows why it was, why it is, that God asks for the love of our hearts. What is it that really determines character? It is not what you do that mainly determines what you are, because it is possible to do so many good things from bad motives. It is love that lies at the root of Christian character—God’s love, the love of what is good. This love of God is the only absolutely pure motive. Christ cares for us and for what we are more than He cares even for the work that we do. The Son of Man has but one test question for every disciple who claims His salvation—the simple question, ‘Lovest thou Me?’
—
Archdeacon H. E. J. Bevan.
Illustration‘I bore with thee long weary days and nights,
Through many pangs of heart, through many tears;
I bore with thee, thy hardness, coldness, slights,
For three-and-thirty years.
Who else had dared for thee what I have dared?
I plunged the depths most deep from bliss above,
I, not my flesh, I, not my Spirit spared;
Give thou Me love for Love.’
THE LAW OF LIFE
One thing then certainly Christ our King presumes to do: He presumes to have the entire command of our affections.
I. Let us consider Who it is that demands love of us.—It is our Maker. He made us, not by any binding necessity, nor yet for any play or pastime of His own, but solely because the very core of His innermost being is fatherhood; He is God, because He is the eternal Father; the Fatherhood is His Godhead. Now perhaps we see daylight. Love is a natural necessity between human parent and child; and love therefore belongs, by the same necessity, to our Divine relationships. For out upon us that mighty fatherhood of God has poured forth its abounding treasure; into our souls His fullness has flowed; underneath us, without fail, now and always, His everlasting arms uphold us; our very characters are only alive in the illuminating fire of His immediate and anointing Spirit.
II. But who are we that we should love God?—What possible meaning has this love to us? We go our own way, we follow our own tastes, we pick our way along the world; we have joys and sorrows, friends and foes of our own; we make interests; we laugh and cry; we fail or we succeed. All this fills up our days and occupies our minds; and where is there any room for the love of a far-away, invisible God? Yes; it is a strange, hard, surprising request. It falls oddly on our ears; it sounds thin and alien and unfamiliar. Yet on it the issues of our lives hang; God has no other test, no other appeal.
III. We must secure and foster the conditions of our sonship; and what does this signify? It signifies this, that the entire movement of our lives must set outward, away from ourselves; for we are sons, and sons, as they draw their life from another, so too find their glory and delight in devoting their lives to another. The first act of sonship then is faith. Faith is the first motion of the soul away from itself, away from its own interest and self-seeking, back to God the mighty Giver. Faith then is the germ of love.
—
Rev. Canon H. Scott Holland.
Illustration‘It is love that the heart cries for, and the only real answer to the poor sinful man or woman wanting to reach the life eternal is to show them God with love in His eyes, to show them God with His heart yearning for them. That is what Christ did. He bade men thus penitent to go away and keep the law, but He knew they never could do that until they had first got God for their friend; therefore He showed them God.’