Now I am longing to tell you what the love of God means; it means all that is good, it means peace—peace from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep—it means joy, it means everything that can be put into the word blessedness. I wish I could tell you how to know that love and to have your heart answering to it. I once went to California, and a brother said to me, ‘Just think, we have three hundred and twenty cloudless days here every year’. I replied, ‘I can beat that by forty-five, I have three hundred and sixty-five cloudless days’. Is that in my circumstances—in my responsible life? Oh, no; but in my spiritual relation to God there is not a single cloud. “We have known and have believed the love which God has to us”. The Spirit has shed abroad His love in my heart, and has produced an answer to it. That is sunshine, peace and rest. The love of God will take away all the worry, and fret, and every evil desire from your heart; it will just clear it out, such things cannot stand in the sunshine of God’s love. Why do people worry and fret about their circumstances? If you had asked Madame Guyon if she wanted to get out of prison, she would answer—

While place we seek, or place we shun,

The soul finds happiness in none.

Now I want you to look at Luke 15 and ponder the occasion. Often when you see golden sunshine the darkness of surrounding clouds make it seem brighter. In this blessed chapter we find the Lord down here, telling out the love of God’s heart, to whom? To “publicans and sinners”. Those are the kind of people that suited Him, and He them, but the Pharisees murmured and said, “This man receiveth sinners”. The Lord says, as it were, ‘I would like to tell you something about God’. And then out comes the full disclosure of the heart of God—how God’s love is set on men, and how God’s heart delights when man turns to Him and repents; man is brought to know the love of God, and there is joy in the presence of angels.

I have come here today with a longing heart. I long for every person in this room, that their hearts might be filled and flooded with the eternal sunshine of God’s love, and that their hearts should learn to respond to that love. Shew me a person not responsive to that love, and I know they do not know it. When you can say, ‘We have known and believed the love of God’, then it is all settled; if I knew that you had all the sunshine of God’s love flooding your heart, and if I heard that any trial had happened to you, I should sympathise with you, but still I would say, ‘It is all right’. Why? Because “all things” work together for good—illness, poverty, sorrow. If you know that a thing is working for good, I could not tell you how quiet it makes you feel.

All God’s love has come out in Jesus—the Son of God. I see two things—I see the love of God resting on Him, He has brought it to light in His Person, and I see in Him, as Man, a perfect answer to that love, and that is what God is seeking to effect with every one of us, to make us like that Man—as we have borne the image of the earthy we shall bear the image of His Son. Cheer up, you are in good hands; God has got you in His hands, and He is working to one end, and that end is to make you like His Son, so that all the eternal sunshine of His love should shine into your heart, and that you might respond to it fully.