God Is Love
“‘f[e that dwelleth tn love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”’
How little we know what we are! To think that that Everlasting God who created heaven and earth, should deal with each one of us individually — with me, and that it should please Him to take out of the fountain of His everlasting Godhead, and to fill me with that everlasting love in which the Father begot the Son and in which the Holy Spirit maintains thefellowship between Father
and Son.
7
“GOD IS LOVE.”
You find these words twice in the fourth chapter of the first Epistle of John. “God is Love.” What does that mean? I think it means at once and first of all that I must not seek for love, for I may fail. If I want love I must seek God, for love is the very nature of God. It does not say God as love, but God zs love, and 7
THE LOVE THAT I NEED
is God Himself coming into my heart. Not a drop of pure, real, heavenly, everlasting love can come to us, but God must be moved to give it as an act of His grace. God has revealed His love in all nature, even in the very animals. Look at the way the little lamb clings to its mother and
Love Midade Pertect 9
=
the way the mother sheep cares for the lamb. That is what we call love. And so amongst the most savage and most ungodly heathen, you can find love of a certain sort. But the love of heaven, the love of eternity, that will last, the love that is not in the flesh, but that comes from heaven, that love is God, and if I want that love I must have God. What a thought! Oh! let the heart bow in humble praise. I want this great God to come into me and to take possession of me and to make mea vessel fit for His use, that He can fill me with love. Let the heart say: “Yea! my God! take me and fill me with love, for the sake of Thy Son who died on Calvary.”
The first question is, “What do we need? What is it we seek?” Then our
10 Love Mave Pertect
second question will be, “What are we to do, what have we to do to get what we are seeking?” And then the third question, “What are we to expect?” Look first of all at your relationship to God! Do you know the love of God as you ought to know it? Does it dwell upon you as an overshadowing power, the way the love of a mother dwells upon the child that lives in her smile? DO YOU KNOW THE LOVE OF GOD, and does it make you from morning to night sing the song of the ransomed ones? There is not a heart but says: “Oh! I know the love of God too little.” And why is that? It is because you have not been perfected in love, because when the soul is perfected in love it has got such a sense of that love that it can rest
Dove Made Perfect II
in it for eternity, and though it has as much as it can contain for the time being it can always receive more. Again, is there no dissatisfaction with your love to God? You sometimes think that you can say: “Oh! my God, I do love Thee.” There are many Christians who don’t say that — real Christians. They are afraid to say it. They fear God, and they say earnestly: “I wish to love God,” and they complain very honestly.
and bitterly, “Oh! my God, why have Iso little love?” but they hardly know what it is tosay,“Oh! thou God of Heaven, how I love Thee! Thou knowest how my heart delights in Thee.” Have you not had to confess often and often that you could not speak like that to God? And does there not come up in the heart a strong feeling of condemnation? “Alas, my love to God is not. what it should be!” And then sometimes when you have a sense of God’s love given to you for a moment in your fellowship with God, is there not a cry, “Oh! why can it not abide with me!” The child has no trouble in rejoicing in its parents’ love. I remember my little boy or girl of five or six,sometimes com: ing to the study door, and opening it, and just looking in and smiling to see papa’s face, and then shutting the door and going away happy; or coming on tip-toe just outside the window, looking in to see papa,and then going off again to play. It was never an effort to the child to love the father. Dear friend, God can do that for you, and make that His love shall all the day cover you,and that your love shall all the day rise up to Him in deep restfulness and inchild-like peace. I am sure God can do it. Iam sure God wants to doit. This is what we need — more love, more love, more of the love of God.
And then look further. Whatisit we need? Look at our love to those around us, in our daily life, in our family, husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, masters and servants.
LOOK AT OUR DAILY LIFE in business! Look at our daily life in society, with the people whom we meet. Remember the remarks that are so easily made about others. Think of the hasty judgments, of the sharp words, of the thoughtless expressions that escape our lips. Think of how many there are on whom our eyes look and there is no outgoing of love towards them. And why is it such an effort to us, and why do we come short? I want you to get hold of one thought, and that is that love is the easiest and most natural thing in the world — if I have got it in me to love — the easiest and happiest thing in the world, if I have only got it in me. But if I have not got it, then I try and try and do it for a little and then I fail. Is not God able? I believe he is, and you believe it too. Is not God able to take such possession of the heart of His child? Is not God able, in His mighty power as God, to come into the heart of His child and to give His love and His spirit? Is not God able to open a fountain of love, so that in all our intercourse day by day it shall be LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
flowing out unceasingly? Christ said: “Hereby shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye love one another.” But oh! the Church of Christ has become a proverb for its contentions and divisions. How terrible! And within the circle of the same little church, of the same little society, of the same little mission, oh, how often between Christians distrust and jealousy; how often unlovingness and harshness! Oh, friend, do you not feel in your own home and in — your own circle and in your business that there is just one thing needed? If my heart wes filled with God’s love,
16 Love Mave Perfect
how easy it would be to live to His glory!
And then there is one thing more. |] must not only think of my relation to God and my relation to my fellow-men around me, but I must especially think of my work.
WHAT IS IT THAT IS WANTED in the work of the Church, and why is there so much complaint of want of power and want of success? The one thing that is wanted is the infinite love of God dwelling in us. What would that do for us? It would give uS more than one thing. In the first place; it would give us a wonderful tenderness and gentleness and meekness and humility in dealing with people. What is the chief mark of Christ Jesus that makes
Him so pleasing to the Father? It is His humility. “Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.” He made His way to the throne of glory in
MEEKNESS AND HUMILITY.
Tell me, is not that what is needed in our work? That the spirit of tender compassion and of gentleness should breathe in every utterance about the people whose souls we are seeking — should be the mark of Christ’s presence. And then more love would not only make us gentle, but, as with Christ Himself, it would also be the power and the inspiration of a divine zeal, so that we would sacrifice all. If we loved others with the love of God, how much more power there would be in our work, how much more sacrifice of time and of ease in praying to God for souls; how much more intercession! Oh! if we loved aright, how much more sacrifice of comfort! how often would we work as I read of a couple of missionaries in China some years ago, asking: What more can we sacrifice for Jesus?
IF THE LOVE OF GOD POSSESSED US, how we should sacrifice everything for souls — our formality, our routine, our habits, the ways we have learned to walk, how they would pass away! Not only would we do more work, but diff erent work — work breathed upon by the love of God. And then, when we have got the divine fire, the divine fire of Christ, the Lamb of God, the Spirit of the Lamb, who gave Himself to the cross, when that is in us, something
Love Made Pertect 1g
passes unconsciously and unwittingly out of usonto the people; they do not know what it is, and we do not know; but how many unconverted men would be converted by the power of God’s love! Is not this
WHAT EVERY WORKER NEEDS?
It is the one thing the Church needs, and — bless God — it is the one thing He wants to give us.
Suppose we see truly our need in our relation to God and to society and to the work we have to do for Christ. “What have we to do?” The first thing is, there will have to be the
DISCOVERY AND CONFESSION of sin. We must not only confess our need, that is part of the work, but we must go far deeper. Take the word
cereal “nerfect love’ as a light or lamp from Heaven and flash it first of all into our own hearts and lives and look at our lives in the light of that perfect love. Turn the light of that word “perfect love” on to Christ, to find out what there is in Him and what He is able to do. Find out exactly what Christ can give us, what Christ can do for us, and how we can become possessed of the life and the love shown in Him for us. Then take this flash light that we have turned upon ourselves first and then upon the face of Jesus, and turn it upon the face of the world, upon the work we have to do in our own immediate circles and in heathendom, and then in the light of the word of perfect love go afresh to work for Jesus.
WE MUST BEGIN WITH OURSELVES, to let the light shine upon ourselves and upon our life. And what does that mean? It means that there will have to be within usa distinct discovery of where we fail. I am not going to make out a list of transgressions against the law of love. But suppose we have made the discovery of how far we have come short in thought and word and deed of this life of perfect love. What then! Are we to come with these sins to God? Yes,and yet that is not enough. What we need is this,to find out what is the root of all. And what is that? Here I have been a Christian for ten or twenty or thirty years, praying fer God to give me love. What is it that ‘« like a devil within me, so that I cannos love? What is this temper or this evil spirit? What is this coldness of disposition? God will lead us to see what is at the root of all. And what is it? Just one word —
SELF, SELF, SELF!
When God created Adam he gave him self-life; with what object? That Adam should bring that self-life to God to be filled with God’s life. And Adam turned away from God and had that self-life closed against God. That is the corruption you and I have inherited from Adam — self. If grace comes into a Christian and begins to work in his heart and the seed of life is planted amidst the mass of surrounding corruption, how the Christian strives and fights and prays and wrestles to conquer, but in vain! It is self that is the one only éause of his
~
failure. He tries to pluck off a fruit here and a bud there; he cuts off one branch after another of this terrible foe to love. He vows and strives and perhaps does grow a little in love, yet at the bottom has not got rest, and why? There is that SOMETHING THERE THAT WILL NOT LOVE. Oh! may God discover to us that terrible something! Self! self! self! We shall then understand that nothing less than death, the death to self, is what must come, if the love of God is to live in us. Thus to come to God, in the confession that there is that in us which must die, and which we cannot slay, is the first step we have to take. The next thing will be a fresh surrender to God. But oh! I think that with many it must be a different surrender from what they have hitherto made. You know many people honestly surrender themselves to God, but they never understood what it is to surrender self. There is a great difference between surrendering yourselves or surrendering your self, as we use the word self; GIVING UP YOUR WHOLE SELF as you are; that root out of which all the evil comes. Many a man says, “Oh! yes, I want to give myself up to God, - just as I am, that He may save me,” and he has never yet understood what the self is that has to be given up, and what the meaning is of giving it up to God. But God teaches the upright; He teaches him through deep humiliation, and then a man finds out “I did indeed turn to.
God, and yet I never turned away from — myself. I took myself with my old will and temper, as I was, and gave myself ‘to God; but that was not what God wanted. God wanted me to turn away from self.” That is the surrender we must ask God to teach us — to give up this accursed self. Dear friend,
DO YOU WANT TO REALIZE perfect love to God in this world? Does that self-will hinder? You must find out some way of dealing with that self, and you cannot deal with it yourself. It is only the love of God coming in that will cast out self; and before God will do that, self must be brought like a criminal, must be laid at His feet.
There is no cure for self but death. We must die to self. How can I do that? I cannot kill myself; I cannot be my own executioner. I cannot nail. myself to the cross. God alone is the death of self. God Himself must do it. He allowed Christ to die on the Cross, and then when Christ had died God raised Himup. That is why, when God brings a man to See all that there is in Christ and to receive Christ fully, the power of Christ’s death can come upon him and he can die to sin; and if he dies to sin, he DIES TO SELF.
How can a man be dead to sin if he is not dead to self? Self is the very root of sin. There is no sin if there is no self. You can takeaway men’s sins, and you can adorn the inner man until you think there is no sin there; but if self is
Se ee
there, sin is there also. ‘Let us ask God ‘that He may teach us what it is to have self given up. Let us then come and ask God for grace to give up ourselves to Him as we have never done before.: Friend, God is love. WILL YOU LET HIM COME IN? Will you surrender yourself to God? [here is another thing that surrender to God implies. When you have come and turrendered yourself, you must now keep your place as one actually given into God’s hands, in deep resignation, looking to Him for what He will do. Wait upon Him to quicken you and to make you alive from the dead. These are the three things we shall need — confession, surrender, and faith. That faith means
this: faith in the power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. Yes, the resurrection of Christ is THE LAW OF THE NEW LIFE.
Christ Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and just so I am born again by the Holy Spirit. But Christ Jesus had to be born again the second time. He had to live and be tried, tempted and tested, to be developed and to be perfected, and then He had to give up His life, and out of the grave, when He was in hopeless, helpless, dark death, God raised Him up. That is what the Christian must come to. The birth in Bethlehem is the likeness of my new birth when I was converted, but the birth from the grave when Christ’ became the first-born of the dead is the likeness and promise of that full birth, in which the power of
ee ee ee
Se ars ae
citnttememeilt — — .. et the death and life of Christ come into me, and I know what it is to be dead with Christ and risen with Him — dead ‘unto self and made alive unto God. Let the one great thing that you do from the morning early when you awake, to the evening when you go to sleep, be this, “Have trust in God,” for what He can do in making you partakers of Christ’s death as the death to self, and His life as a life to God and in God,a life in perfect love. Say to God: “My Father, I trust in Thee, for what Thou alone canst do,” and say to yourself, “I am going to believe in God, in the mighty power with which He raised Christ from the dead to work in me and in God’s
children around me.”
Hove Made Pertect
“WHAT ARE WE TO EXPECT?” We know what we are seeking and we know what we have got to do, but now comes the question, ‘What are we to expect?” My answer is, “Let us expect something beyond all expectation.” We have so often limited God by our thoughts, and we are doing it still. Yet Paul speaks of “Love that passeth knowledge,” and then he further says “God is able to do above all that we can ask or think.” Now prepare yourself for SOMETHING THAT PASSETH KNOWLEDGE, for something that is above what you can think, and give God the honor of doing something divine. Then, further, if you ask, “What mustyI expect?” I would sum it up in these words: “Jesus Himself.” The work of God the Father is to beget God the Son, and that is the work which goes on through eternity. When we read cf the eternal generation, that does not mean that it was a thing in the past. Eternity, what is eternity? Eternity is ever going on. It is an ever present now, and the one work of God the Father is to beget the Son. What do I expect? I expect God to give all who are prepared, the indwelling Christ in their hearts, in a power they have never known, so that we may get rooted and grounded in love, and know the Love that passeth knowledge. That is what we need and what we may expect. God has NOTHING FOR US BUT JESUS.
Anything beyond that Gcd cannot give
you, but God is willing and able to give this, the living Son born afresh into us. And then He reveals Him to us, and when the living Christ dwells in us, He will break open the fountain of love within us. That is what we want. Expect it now. Fix your eye upon Jesus, Jesus Himself. He must do it. He has done it. He has taught us on Calvary what it is that He gave up His life for, that in His fellowship with us, our old man might be crucified with Him. He has done it all for us. We want God to reveal to us what that means, and to make us partakers of it. You may say: “I have so often tried to believe in Jesus, but there has been so much failure and I am so ignorant.” Paul prayed that God would strengthen believers mightily by the Holy Spirit. It is only
CO a Pe ee ee es Se oe eae CCC
Move MPadve Perfect 33
the Father can reveal the Son; and He does it only by the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is to many of us only a piece of our orthodoxy, a doctrine we read about in books, occasionally hear of in sermons and confess every Sunday. Oh! listen to that prayer in Ephesians: God the Father giving the Holy Spirit to work mightily in us, and the Holy Spirit making Jesus dwell in us. WHEN JESUS DWELLS IN US,
then we are filled with love unto all the fullness of God- — -the Triune God, not only in Heaven, but in our hearts. Fix your hearts upon this: the Father must do it, and what the Father will do, I must expect, the Father, God Almighty, to give this Jesus into my heart as an indwelling Saviour; what the Father does is to strengthen us with might by: the Holy Spirit in the inner man. Expect that. Fix your heart upon God. That is the one way to the Father, and as we go along step by step, let your heart be filled with this: God is Love. Love is the Divine omnipotence. Love is the life and the glory of God. Yes. God is Love. There is the love of the Father, and the love of the Son, and the love of the Spirit. Let us fix our hope on the love of the Father giving the Son into our hearts. Let us rejoice in the Son coming with God’s perfect love to dwell within. Let us bow in stillness while the Holy Spirit works mightily within us to shed abroad the love. God will come unto us, and will bring us into His banqueting-house, and His banner over us will be love. May God teach the waiting heart to expect this, nothing less than the
Perfect Love of God perfected in us.