THE LOVE OF GOD AND RESPONSE TO IT
I do not want to give an address this afternoon but just to talk to you quite informally about the love of God.
In the beginning of Luke’s gospel we learn who the Lord Jesus Christ was as Man. He was the Son of God. If you want to learn who He is as a divine Person you must go to John’s gospel; John 1: 18 brings out that truth. But in Luke we learn who He is as Man. The angel Gabriel said to Mary, “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God”, Luke 1: 35. So when He was born God immediately owns Him in this peculiar way: “Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee”, Heb 1: 5. Now what marked Him as Man was this—He was the Son of God. When He was baptised God opened the heavens and said, “This is my beloved Son”, shewing that the Lord Jesus Christ was the peculiar object of the love of God, and He adds—“In thee I have found my delight”, showing that there is in Him as Man a perfect answer to God’s love. How these two things mark Him! If you give your heart to any one, nothing would satisfy you but that they should answer to that love. What I want to bring before you is the Lord Jesus Christ as Man. Nothing was lacking in God’s delight in Him; all His affection was concentrated on that Man, to whom He says: “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight”. But more than that, God found in that Man a perfect response to His love. I wish I could express what that must have been to God. He created man in perfect innocence; man was an innocent creature and there was a delightful intercourse between God and Adam. God walked in the garden, but then sin came in, and God lost all pleasure in that man and had to drive him out of the garden, and put a flaming sword at the gate of Paradise. About one thousand six hundred years ran on until you come to Genesis 6: 6, and God looked down and we are told that “it grieved him in his heart”.
Then later we get the children of Israel. God separated them for Himself, and gave them the law and said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart”, Deut 6: 6. Was there any response in man? Before Moses came down from the mount man had set up an idol. Man has never responded to God; he was only a disappointment to Him. God had set His heart on man but He got no response from him. But the Son of God came here into Manhood and God can look down on Him and say—There is not only a Man on whom I can concentrate all My love, but there is One who answers perfectly to My love.
Now what is the point of Christianity? Why, to make you and me like that Man—like the Son of God. In Romans 8: 29 we are told that we are “predestinated … to be conformed to the image of his Son”. God has got that before Him; that is what Christianity means, and what the gospel means—that you and I should be like the Son of God, so that we might know and enjoy all God’s love and answer to it. The great point of Luke 15 is that the Lord Jesus, who was the peculiar object of the heart of God—the One who knew that love and was answering to it as no one else could—that He tells out the heart of God. There is only one thing worth your while, or worth mine, only one thing worth knowing, and that is the heart of God—to know God’s love, and that He can fill your heart and mine. We like the sunshine and rejoice in it, but, beloved, what is it to have your heart lit up with the eternal sunshine of the love of God, and to have your heart responsive to that love. Issues are being raised now as to what we believe doctrinally; these questions are but as dust, the great thing is—do you by the Spirit know that God is love? Has the sunshine of that love entered your heart? John, in his first epistle, says, “We have known and have believed the love which God has to us” (1 John 4: 15); that is the point, for as you know it and believe it, your heart answers to it, and we love Him because He first loved us. Could anything be more simple? We all know how everything changes here, how disappointments and sorrows come in, but at all times there is the love of God, and that love is brighter than the sun. The sun will set tonight, but God’s love has no sunset, no clouds or interruptions; there it is like eternal sunshine, it shines and shines on for ever.
In Luke 15 we get really one parable in three parts, but all three are distinct; the shepherd is distinct from the father, but the shepherd is God the Son, the woman is God the Spirit, the father is God the Father—there is distinction on the one hand but marvellous blending on the other.
And all is to bring out the heart of God! The Son of God came down here to express before man all that was in the heart of God; now He has died, has been raised from the dead, exalted and glorified. All the light of that love, and response to that love, has been left in this world, and now from Christ exalted the Spirit has come down and the love of God is shed abroad in hearts by the Holy Ghost. That is to say, the Spirit has come to make good in your heart and in mine the very love that rested on Him as Son of God and to which He perfectly responded; the Holy Ghost has come to shed abroad that very love so that the eternal sunshine of it should light up our hearts to produce the same kind of response to it that there was in His heart.
What was the response? Look at Him in that dark moment in Gethsemane; the agony of His soul was so great that the sweat was as drops of blood. What did He say? “Abba, Father”. In the heart of that blessed Man in that dark moment there was perfect response to the love of God. God takes us up and makes us sons. He has “sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”, that is, producing in our hearts the same response to Himself that was in the heart of Jesus, the Son of God. That is Christianity; and I assure you that nothing is worth your thought or mine but that your heart and mine should know the same love that He knew as Man here—that that same love should fill your heart and mine with eternal sunshine and that there should be produced in your heart the same response as there was from His—that “Abba, Father”, the utterance of responsive affection should be begotten in your heart by faith and in the knowledge of the love of God. It does not mean that you will not have trials and sorrows here. If it is a question of trials, He is the pattern Man. Do not imagine that you will not have trials; it is guaranteed to us by the Lord, for He says: “In the world ye have tribulation” (John 14: 33), and strangely enough tribulation is what we are so afraid of.
But what does scripture say? “We also boast in tribulations, knowing that tribulation works endurance; and endurance, experience”, Rom 5: 3. Do you not want experience? Do you know what is the matter with people when they go about with sad faces and are full of complaints? They do not know the love of God; the divine remedy for sorrow is knowing the love of God, bowing to the will of the One who so loves me. If you knew His love you would be like one4who in a dark, damp cell in prison wrote—
Upon God’s will I lay me down
As child upon its mother’s breast;
No silken couch or bed of down
Could ever give me such sweet rest.