Christian Love
“Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.” love the Lord whom we have not seen (8). We must also love our brethren whom we have seen. The latter indeed is the test of the former. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?” (i John iv. 20). “See that ye love one another.”
But such love is not an easy thing. We are inclined to read such an exhortation as this, and go our way, saying, “Oh yes, this is all we need do. We must love every one, and especially those who belong to the same Christian church as ourselves — our brethretir And what is the love to which we set ourselves? Is it not too often an easy sentimentality? To give things away: to indulge every wish and whim: to make things easy and pleasant all round: to wear a gracious smile — this is too often the life which we propose to ourselves, as the carrying out of the precepts of universal love. And for some temperaments this is the easiest life possible. They are naturally affable, pleasant, genial, and generous. But does this fulfil the repeated injunction of the New Testament, that we should love one another “as Christ has loved us “? For, after all, there is often a species of refined selfishness in our apparent courtesy, which desires to stand well with all, or shrinks from taking too much trouble.
What is that love of which our Lord and his Apostles speak? Not only, or primarily, kind feelings, or generous impulses. Not certainly the sentimentality which breathes itself out in ’56 Clrriattan f oirc.
sighs and raptures. Not merely the fond attachment which clings as the rose against the trellis. But, above all things, service — ministry — self-denial and self-giving. To put another’s well-being before our own — not because it is pleasant to do it, but because it is right. To make another the pivot around which the wheel of activity revolves. To give oneself to death a hundred times a day in unobtrusive, trifling acts of self-denial. To check the hasty word, the unkind speech, the damaging criticism. To vacate a comfortable seat in a railway carriage for the sake of the love of God. To lead a little child home, when lost in the street, or in an agony of terror from a thunder-storm, to win the “inasinuchP To show to the inmates of one’s home, in the most trifling incidents, the same behaviour as is prompted in men of the world by mere politeness; and to do it for the sake of Jesus. All these things are traits of a love which has no native origin in human hearts, but emanates from the being of God, descending into the hearts of his own, and passing back through them to Him again. And this is what God asks of us. Let us examine the marks of such love; its efficient cause; its Divine origin. And may the Holy Spirit, whose firstfruit is “love” (Gal. v. 22), shed it abroad abundantly within our hearts.
I. The Marks of such Love.
(i) Unfeigned. — Dissimulation is a disease very antagonistic to Christian love. More than once we are warned against it in the Apostolic writings (Rom. xii. 9; 2 Cor. vi. 6). We are all tempted to profess more than we feel; to kiss those whom we are betraying; to cover with soft words crevasses which are yawning deeper eveiy day. How much more effusive we are to our friends than our thoughts of them sometimes warrant! How often we are one thing to their face and another to their back! How subtly we are tempted to maintain appearances, because of some ulterior gain!
Our politeness is often but skin-deep. Our smiles assumed for a purpose. Our words smoother than butter, whilst our hearts are drawn swords. Our acceptance of apologies, as superficial as Joseph’s brethren thought that his would prove to be after old Jacob’s death. Our love is not altogether “unfeigned.”
(2) Pure. — “Hearts may be cemented by impurity, by ungodly conversation and society in sin, as in uncleanness or drunkenness. The mutual love of Christians must be pure, from such causes as are pure and spiritual, arising out of the Saviour’s command or example.” The eye of the heart must be single; its habit stainless; its motives “white as the light.” There must be no thought or suspicion of the passions of the flesh, which lie so near to the springs of intense spirituality in men and women. The love of the world so often ends in lust; lofty ideals are shattered; cloudless mornings become overcast. And our temptation lies in the same direction. It is a mistake to think that, because we meet in religious assemblies, and talk of hymns, and sermons, and sacred themes, there is no danger of the taint of impurity destroying the delicate sensitive bloom of our spirits. Too often our love is not pure.
(3) Fervently. — “On the stretch.” Not with the loose string of the unstrung bow, but with the tension of the strings of the violin drawn out to their full. This is a model which almost seems to mock us. It is so much easier to be on the stretch for ourselves than to seek the good of others with the same eager energy. Our love seldom gets beyond “temperate,” and never to boiling point. We have not learnt the secret of the heart bubbling over. We are not fervent in our love. We do not weep over our brethren’s faults; or rejoice in their success as much as in our own; or love them with a passion which should act as an alembic for the evil that is in them.
It was the Master’s last prayer that we should love like this. He meant that we should put off anger, wrath, malice, and evil speaking; and that we should put on bowels of mercies, kindness, longsuffering, and forbearance. So would the world believe (John xvii. 21).
II. The Efficient Cause of such Love. — It will come through “obeying the truth.” This is very marvellous. We should have thought that our love to each other would have been promoted best by meeting for social enjoyment, by knowing each other better, by constant association in Christian work. But this is not God’s way. The true lens by which hearts are made to glow is the Truth.
We must know the truth. — Put two burnished mirrors opposite each other, and there will be no glow of light on either; but if a candle stand between, the beams of light are flung to and fro, to an extent impossible to either or both alone. So the mere contact of Christian with Christian will not necessarily produce the burning heart, unless there be also between them the Truth of God.
Study the lives of the saintliest men; and you will find it to have been their invariable experience, that their love to God and men grew in the precise proportion in which they explored the treasures of Divine truth. It was when their intellects were most engaged in discovering the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, that their hearts seemed in a rapture of irrepressible and inexpressible ecstasy. “Did not our heart burn within us while He opened to ns the Scriptures?”
We micst also obey the truth. — Do, and you shall know. Obey, and you will love. Some try to promote love by the use of endearing epithets; or by the endless repetition of experience; or by reading rapturous expressions, like those which were so natural to a Bernard or a Rutherford. But such endeavours will soon wear themselves out.
A thousand times better shall we find it to set ourselves to “obey the truth.” Let no command lie unfulfilled in some dusty corner of the soul. Let no margin intervene between your feet and the limit of your light. Let the life follow the Divine Word as closely as the great Lawgiver followed the cloud sailing majestically through the heavens. Translate all precepts into the vernacular of daily duty; and you will verify, in a yet deeper sense than ever, the Master’s words: “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me” (John xiv. 2i).
As we obey the truth., we shall be purified by it. — Young men cleanse their way by taking heed thereto according to the Divine Word. The Bridegroom purifies his bride by the washing of water through the Word. Oh, all ye who groan under the sense of a defiled heart — here is one secret of cleanliness, Obey the truth.’
Many will read these lines who are athirst for purity and love. Innocence can never be theirs — the innocence that consists in ignorance of evil and unconsciousness of temptation. But they desire that purity which passes through evil untainted, as sunbeams through a foetid atmosphere, and for that love which floods cannot drown, like the old Greek fire which burnt under water.
The atheist does not think that these things are possible. He has no hope in God, and no belief in man. He looks darkly on all profession, and sadly suspects every motive. Oh, do not let your high hopes be dashed or your ambitions lowered by his suggestions. Undaunted, still seek for the holy grail of a pure and burning heart. It shall certainly reward your search at last.
There is no need to seek this blessed gift in the wilderness, like St. Anthony; on the pillar, like Simon Stylites; in the recesses of the forest, like Gaudama. “The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart” (Rom. x. 8). Purify your heart in obeying the truth imto unfeigned love of the brethren.
Nor will it be difficult to understand how it is that so simple a method will achieve so great a result, when we have given the next consideration its true weight.
III. The Divine Origin of the Life within. — “Having been begotten again” (23, R.V.). Our spiritual life is “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John i. 13). We have been twice born. Born once by nature into the stock of the first Adam; and born a second time by grace into the stock of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. “Of his own will God begat us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” (James i. 18). One chief evidence of this life is simple trust in the Saviour. As many as believe in his name were born (John i. 13).
And the life that has been implanted within us is like the inheritance which awaits us (4) and the blood which purchased us (18) — incorruptible. It cannot, therefore, be limited by
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the narrow landmarks of time, or sense, or this fleeting world. It overleaps and defies them all. It partakes of the nature of the Infinite and Eternal. Thus it follows that the piety it affects is of celestial temper, and the love it manifests is the true unfeigned love of Deity. The best guarantee of the permanence and reality of Christian Purity and Love is to look at the life from which they emanate, and which is implanted by the second birth — a life which in turn is best considered in the seed from which it has come, and by which it has been communicated to the believer’s heart.
That seed is here contrasted with the outward life of men. All flesh is as grass: men and women pass away as the successive crops on the meadows. And the glory ofjnan as the flower of grass. The king-cups and daisies share the fate of the lowly blades around them, emblems of the impotence of wealth or strength or beauty to resist the ravages of the sickle of Time. But in contrast to this stands out the eternal Truth of God, which is enshrined in the holy words of God. It is living and life-giving. It remaineth and “abideth for ever.”
That the Bible is amongst us to-day — in spite of all that has been done to destroy it, by fire, and search, and sword — attests the fact that there are properties in it which divide it by an impassable chasm from all books beside. It is clearly true of all Scripture words, that they “are spirit and life,” and can never pass away; and that not one jot or tittle shall fail. And this fact that the Bible lives and abides, notwithstanding all that has been done against it, proves that it possesses something of the life of the eternal and infinite God. God is manifestly in this Book, as of old in the acacia bush of the desert; or as natural life burns like a tiny spark within each seed falling adown the bank. The persistence of the Book proves God to be in it. And therefore it is God’s life which enters dead human souls through the Word and makes them live. The life which is thus begotten in them is infinite and eternal as Himself. And, being so, it lifts its possessors above the time-sphere into the very realm of heaven, and enables them to love, not with the poor faltering love of man, but with the royal, pure, unfeigned, blessed love, which is the very soul of the life of God Himself.