09-Love Towards God
IX. LOVE TOWARDS GOD.
2 THESSALONIANS in. 5. “The Lord direct your hearts into the love of God.” THE first and great commandment, said our Lord Jesus Christ, is this, “Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” This commandment does not impose upon us onerous labours; it does not require us to perform services which would eat out a large part of our life. It was not this commandment to which St Peter referred, when he described the yoke of Judaism as one “which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear.” To love is the happiest exercise of our human nature, not incompatible with other employment, not a burden superadded to life, but the sovereign lightener of its load. But is the command therefore an easy and a light one?
There are many, I am sure, to whom such an account of it would at times seem ironical and a mockery. “Thou shalt love.” Do we then love at command and by compulsion? If we are bidden to do a thing within our power, we can do it, whether we like it or not; but if we are bidden to like it, the very dictate is more calculated to provoke aversion than to create the liking. And what kind of affection is it that is thus imperatively demanded of us? Nothing languid or neutral, but a feeling of the utmost conceivable energy. We are called upon to love God with all the heart and soul and mind and strength. He who is to be the object of this love is a Being whom we have never seen, and whom, however near us he may be, it is certainly possible to forget. Add the further consideration, that our affections are being at all times powerfully solicited by quite different objects. It is no wonder if this commandment, when it is understood and acknowledged as calling for a real obedience, instead of being regarded as a light thing, often excites in our minds a feeling of helplessness and despondency. “ There is nothing like such love in our hearts,” we say, when we look within. And when, as we always do, we look at others to compare ourselves with them, we may reassure ourselves a little by seeing too plainly that our fellow-Christians in general are almost as far from keeping this commandment as we are.
I am not speaking now to persons who have made up their minds that there is no God who can be known, and that all who have believed in a God have been merely crouching before an enlarged shadow of themselves projected upon the obscure curtain of the surrounding world. I am addressing Christians, not altogether ignorant of the happiness of loving God, willing to believe that if it Were only possible, there would be joy as well as safety in loving God with entire devotion, and even now, loving God more than they have given themselves credit for doing. But we are all troubled in some measure by the difficulties which weigh heavily at this time upon many ingenuous minds. Far as we may be from holding the creed that God is unknowable, we do not find him easy to know. We are aware that conceptions about God have varied greatly amongst religious persons and nations.
Many opinions concerning the Divine nature have been abandoned, not it would seem because men have observed God more closely, but because the advance of scientific and social knowledge has made those opinions untenable. Each, in his own experience as a believer in God, has had to put away childish things. If we desire to make our knowledge of God more sure and defined, we are much at a loss how to do it. We cannot employ our senses upon the Divine nature, we cannot subject it to tests, we cannot go round it and survey it. We have no means of demonstration by which we can compel all rational minds to assent even to the most fundamental conclusions about God, and it is at first a shock and always a discouragement to find that there are able thinkers who do not share the convictions which to us are sacred. It may seem to us, moreover, that the high and lofty One inhabiting eternity, filling the immeasurable universe, needing nothing from us, with a range of government to which our life is so microscopically insignificant, is not such a Being as to draw forth emotions in us which we should naturally call love.
We do not render the warmth of our hearts to an unsearchable mystery. And when we have confessed that the God of our worship is really entitled to our love, and our consciences have witnessed that we ought to love him, there is always the hardness of our hearts to deplore. We are wayward and selfish and sinful, and bestow our love wrongly, and either give way to evil influences or struggle against them with constant ill-success.
How poor and fitful, at the very best, must any human love of God be!
I am speaking, I say, to those who know that they are called to love God, but who are painfully conscious of the immense difference between the demand made on them by their calling, and the fulfilment of it by themselves and their fellowChristians, and who are inclined to plead in excuse the difficulties which beset the human soul with regard to the knowledge and love of God. In what I have to say this morning, my endeavour will be to suggest to you some few thoughts, in the light of which those difficulties may appear, perhaps, less depressing and insurmountable. i. Let us not take pleasure in fixing our thoughts upon the inevitable imperfection of our knowledge and the inadequacy of our faculties, so as to forget or underrate what we can and do know of God. Rather let us admit and take for granted whatever can be said as to the incomprehensibility of God, and then putting this admission aside let us consider whether God does not in fact in some manner and with whatever qualifications make himself known to us.
It is a first principle of the Christian belief in God, that he has revealed himself as a Father to us in his Son Jesus Christ. We have no higher or more essential or more trustworthy knowledge of God than that which we receive by studying Jesus Christ. Now when we think of this, we have before our minds much that need not be affected by the weakness of our faculties or the variableness of our mental conceptions and acquirements.
Go to the heart of what the Son of God declared by word and life concerning his Father.
If Jesus Christ was true, God the maker and controller of all things is essentially good. Christ does not directly tell us much of the modes of God’s relation to created things; he passes by metaphysics and ontology. But he gives us to understand that goodness is higher than power, and moral creativeness more Divine than physical.
He shews the Father to us as having a gracious will, and purposes of blessing, and an orderly and trustworthy moral government. The degree of Divine Love which he declares is very difficult for us to believe; the way in which that Love acted through Christ may strike us at first as strange and incongruous. The Love shewed itself not by a mastering and overpowering benevolence, but in self-humiliation and sympathy and appeal, seeking not to make all men happy by arrangement, but to win human hearts into spiritual fellowship with itself. The former method might have seemed to us the more likely: but compare the two, both as to essential quality and as to the value of the effects produced, Love speaking to human hearts in sacrifice and appeal, and Love arranging things so that there may be no suffering. Which is the better? This is perhaps the most absolutely vital of all possible questions. All other questions of belief seem to me to mount up ultimately into this. If our hearts confess that Love is more Divine than Power, and that Love manifested in Sacrifice surpasses Love in any other form, then the fact that we should not have expected to behold the Eternal Father giving up his Son, or the Lord of Glory consenting to be crucified, becomes to us a strong additional argument for believing that in this act of Sacrifice we do indeed see the essential Divine Nature revealing itself. And no difficulties of the understanding, which, as we are agreed, is quite incompetent to comprehend God, ought to be allowed to overthrow this testimony in which spirit recognizes Spirit. When we have caught a glimpse of this highest thing, Love appealing through sacrifice and thus working out a living spiritual order, we may say that we have a knowledge of God which is not liable to be affected by the conditions which make so many of our apprehensions temporary and unstable. St Paul saw that faith and hope and love abide; compared with imagination, understanding, and exposition, which have to do with things in a perpetual condition of development, and which experience shews to be variable, faith and hope and love are permanent; they are substantially the same in the child and in the man, in the primitive and in the civilized stage of culture. To these faculties of the spirit God reveals that which is eternal. So far as we apprehend his gracious and righteous will, drawing out our trust and hope and love, we have been permitted to penetrate to that which is essentially Divine.
Whilst, however, the revelation of God made to us through Christ is the supreme one, it is not isolated or exclusive. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is to be looked for in the glorious framework of Nature, in the gradually developed institutions of human society, and in the inspirations by which our individual life is visited and guided. Not embarrassing ourselves with attempts to form systems by which we may account for the whole world and all that we see in it, attempts which may very likely be unsuccessful and disappointing, we may hold fast in all inquiries and contemplations our belief in Supreme Love and Righteousness, and watch devoutly for the signs by which they may manifest themselves. Other revelations of God will not supersede that which has been given in Christ, and brought to us through the Bible and the tradition and development of the Church, but they will illustrate it, and bring it home to our minds at multiplied points of contact, and help us to feel its reality and power.
2. God then, let us be sure, is not a Being whom we cannot possibly love for want of knowing him. But what is the kind of affection with which we can regard the Being thus genuinely revealed to us? Must we not say that he is too mysterious, too much above us, to be loved?
Now, in Holy Scripture, the great test of love is devotion. What will a man do for one whom he loves? is the question. And it is from this point of view that we may most wisely regard the command that we should love God. The first and great commandment ought not, indeed, to be relaxed and toned down to suit human infirmity. The Righteous Judge will make due allowance for our frailty, but his commandments remain unchanged. They represent what is right and best for man. God has made it good and right for us to love him with all the energy of which our hearts are capable. That is an eternal law, expressed for our benefit in the form of an imperative demand. But if we wished to examine ourselves about the keeping of this commandment, it would probably not be the wisest course to look back upon our inward experiences, and to try to estimate the warmth of emotion of which we have been conscious towards God. Our emotions are not directly under our control; and, of the various kinds of feeling comprehended under the name of love, we might not perhaps understand accurately what is best suited to our relation to God; and we might therefore judge ourselves wrongly.
It might be best to ask ourselves, not so much how we have felt, as how far we have been loyal to God in our outward and inward acts. Such loyalty will be the safest proof of our love.
We have examples, it is true, in all ages, of language of intense emotion uttering in words of undoubted sincerity the desire of the human heart towards God. Such is that of the Psalmist, “ Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God.” And I doubt not that the most fervent and passionate utterances of this kind of love will often awaken a sympathetic response in the Christian hearts of our own day. Where there is the sensibility that thrills easily into unsatisfied yearning, it is certain that the contemplation of God as he reveals himself to us, in the blended tenderness and mysteriousness of his nature, will touch it and draw forth the longing desire of love. But the love required by the commandment may be rendered in other forms than that of a brooding emotion. Let me suggest what the ordinary type of the Christian’s love towards God would be. It ought to be grounded in awe. The fear of the Lord is the beginning, not only of wisdom, but of love. All increase of the knowledge of God must tend to deepen our reverence. Whether we dwell upon the vastness and subtlety of his creative operations, or enter into the secrets of his redeeming work and purpose, a spirit of reverence that will hush all mere familiarity of intercourse cannot fail to take possession of us. But our fear of God will be such as to dwell in entire harmony with a grateful sense of Jds goodness. The consciousness that we are unworthy in ourselves of the least of God’s mercies will feed our reverential gratitude. All the delightfulness of nature, all the bounty of the fruitful seasons, all the charities of domestic and social life, will form a scale of blessing leading up to the redeeming and fatherly love of God in Christ; and the privations and crosses which give us pain, instead of being an account on the other side to be deducted from the goodness, will undergo a marvellous conversion when we learn that by these means God is making us more truly his children, and thus, with more power than any happiness untouched by sorrow, will teach our hearts to be thankful. A very ordinary Christian, moved by influences which come to all alike, may Avell be expected to feel habitually a desire rising at times into intensity, to cast himself at the feet of God and to give himself up utterly to his service and pleasure. But, above all, the Christian’s love of God should imply earnest and deliberate choice of the will of God in preference to anything that goes counter to that will. Loyalty, I repeat, will be taken as the essential proof of our love. Without loyalty, emotions would have no worth in God’s sight, but rather would be distasteful to him. And the inwardly loyal Christian will assuredly grow according to his endowments and capacity in the filial love of God.
3. And now let me refer in a few words to the hindrances which our sinful and worldly dispositions put in the way of our loving God. Ah, brethren, it is here, as you know too well, that we find our chief difficulty. Whilst the spirit within us, moved by the Divine Spirit, is crying Abba, Father, the flesh is lusting against the spirit. We love the world, and if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. God is too good for our foolish and sinful hearts to love.
Well, we must lead a life of continual conflict. As the Eternal Father has made us to love him and claims our love, and on the other side enslaving and corrupting influences are always soliciting us, we cannot live as those who yield to a current which carries them along. We must keep ourselves in an attitude of watchful resistance, ready to unmask disguised forms of evil, and exercising ourselves in the love of God. And let us be sure that in all preference of good to evil God recognizes love towards himself. Never accustom yourselves to associate God with technical religion only. No habit, believe me, can be more fatal to the honest and manly love of God. No, let me read in your ears once more those invaluable words of St Paul, “ Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” Remember, brethren, these are the words not of a modern thinker who sets morality above religion, but of him who declared in the same letter that he counted all precious things but dung that he might win Christ and be found in him. That love of all good things is in living harmony with the most intense devotion to Christ. To Christ; yes, it is through him that we are most effectually bound to the Father and to all things in the world that are of the Father. As we consider Christ, we bring ourselves under the influence of the full stream of the Divine Love; and it is God’s love, shed abroad in our hearts, which teaches us to love. We love God, because he first loved us. No human heart can really love God, except responsively, except through becoming conscious of being loved by God. So it is that sin and worldliness are most effectually shamed. If we knew nothing of the redeeming and adopting love of God, we might perhaps excuse ourselves in our running after vanities and our many insincerities and our degrading bondage to ease or luxury or excitement. But what sort of astes are these for souls for which Christ died? O we must sometimes hate ourselves for the answer that we render back to the Divine Love! Cling, dear brethren, as for life, to the glorious Sacrifice which provokes in us this salutary shame. We do not want to be reconciled to our worse selves, we want to be reinforced against them. And the Cross that bears witness of the mingling of Divine Love and Sorrow will nerve our strength for conflict as well as soften our hearts in contrition. Under that ensign we shall be more than conquerors through him that loved us.