THE ACTIVITY OF LOVE
[p. 263] THE ACTIVITY OF LOVE
It is of great importance to apprehend the connection between righteousness and love. In the death of Christ love has been so perfectly served by righteousness that the very nature of God has been reconciled to and by His attributes! What it has effected for God is that He can now have to say to us as believers entirely apart from the ‘old man’. The latter has been completely and forever removed from under His eye, so that He has now His pleasure in not only regarding us as justified and thus clear of guilt and the judgment of it, but as risen with Christ and thus on a resurrection footing, “as he is so are we in this world”. That is, God can delight in us as in His Son, because we are in Him in resurrection life. It is alone on this ground that He can give us the Holy Spirit, whereby love is shed abroad in our hearts. Activity is the essential characteristic of love, and the formative result of this power in the heart is to exclude fear and give practical deliverance from the old man even as this deliverance has been effected for God. It is only as we are formed in love that fear is cast out, and that we are personally and practically divested of the ‘old man’. Deliverance as to these two things goes on in preparation as we grow in the divine nature. It is impossible for the heart to be divested of fear until we see how God can according to righteousness and in His good pleasure have to say to us, and delight in us entirely apart from the ‘old man’. It is of immense moment when we reach the point of deliverance which enables us to put off the old man and put on the new! There must be first the apprehension of what has been effected for God in the removal of what was obnoxious to Him, and then what on our side answers to it in the faith of our souls by the Holy Spirit. There can be no such answer unless we allow the Spirit of God to [p. 264] form us in love, however much we may know about it as a truth. Deliverance from fear, and the practical putting off of the ‘old man’ can alone be true in us in proportion as the formative power of love goes on in the soul. This is God’s way but it often and indeed generally takes nearly a lifetime before it has practical effect in us, as the fruit of His Spilt and the desire of His heart.
1898.