August 21

With loving-kindness have I drawn thee. - Jeremiah 31:3.

THE gospel has been exceedingly injured, as to its practical influence and results, by being reduced to a mere republication of the law of nature, or a mere moral code. And we would ask boldly whether a man who receives only a class of moral rules from God, accompanied with a declaration that the observance of them shall hereafter be recompensed,-can such a man have the same feelings towards the blessed God as the man who believes he is in mercy redeemed from the lowest hell by the sacrifice of God’s own Son, that he is already blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ? And to order us to deny ourselves, to sacrifice our beloved lusts and passions and wish their eternal destruction, even if reason and conscience acknowledge the rectitude of the requirement, will never attach us to a sovereign power, or cause us to love these declarations and these truths.

To tell a man that every thing here is only in a state of probation and that every thing depends on his own prudence and his own fidelity,- can we imagine that this will ever produce a childlike confidence in God, or delight in his service? Assuredly not. And nothing will, but a manifestation of goodness so great as to overpower the heart and gain it: and such a manifestation of goodness there is. We have it in the manger, in the garden, on the cross, in the grave. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and gave his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.” “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” It is here, and here alone, we can be drawn with the “cords of love and with the bands of a man,” and effectually bound forever. And this, therefore, is the grand and only expedient the only wise God has devised and revealed to bring back the minds of his alienated creatures to himself.

It is obvious that the first step in the return of the criminal must be confidence. “We are saved by hope.” God knows this, and he provides for it, and he therefore banishes our fears, he expels from our minds all jealousies, and all unworthy conceptions of himself, and obtains the trust, the entire trust, of our poor hearts. He purges our consciences by the glorious gospel from dead works, that we may serve the living God. He enlarges the heart so that we can run in the way of his commandments. We have obtained not the spirit of bondage again to fear, but have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.” Hence the Apostle Jude says to Christians, “Keep yourselves in the love of God;” that is, love the commandments of his love to you, that you may live in the exercise of your love to God.

And this is the meaning of Paul to the Ephesians, when he speaks of their being “rooted and grounded in love;” he means in the discovery of his love, in the producing their love to him, as is obvious from what follows:-“That ye may be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”