You Won’t Reach It on Tiptoe!
You Won’t Reach It on Tiptoe!
Furnish your . . . brotherliness with Christian love. 2 Peter 1:5, 7 (Moffatt)
Love, to most of us, is an indefinite thing; we do not know what we mean when we speak of love: The love Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 13 means the sovereign preference of my person for another person, and everything depends on who the other person is. Jesus demands that the sovereign preference be for Him. We cannot love to order, and yet His word stands—“If any come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,” (i.e. a hatred of every loyalty that would divide the heart from loyalty to Jesus) “he cannot be My disciple.” Devotion to a Person is the only thing that tells; and no man on earth has the love which Jesus demands, unless it has been imparted to him. We may admire Jesus Christ, we may respect Him and reverence Him; but apart from the Holy Ghost we do not love Him. The only Lover of the Lord Jesus Christ is the Holy Ghost. In Romans 5:5, Paul says that “the love of God”—not the power to love God, but the love of God—“is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” The Holy Ghost is the gift of the ascended Christ. “Have I received the Holy Ghost?” Not, “Do I believe in Him?” but, “Have I received Him?” Something must come into me. (Luke 11:13.) When by a willing acceptance, I receive the Holy Spirit, He will shed abroad the love of God in my heart; and on the basis of that love I have to practise the working out of the things which Peter mentions here, and Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 13. We cannot reach it on tiptoe; some of us tried to once for seven days, then we got tired! The springs of love are in God, not in us. It is absurd to look for the love of God in our natural hearts; the love of God is only there when it has been shed abroad by the Holy Ghost.
1. Love Where You Cannot Respect
But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
The revelation of God’s love is that He loved us when He could not possibly respect us—He loved us “while we were yet sinners”; “when we were enemies.”†††††† When we receive the nature of God into us, the first thing that happens is that God takes away all pretence and pious pose; and He does it by revealing that He loved us, not because we were loveable, but because it is His nature to love. “God is love.” The surest evidence that the nature of God has come into me is that I know I am a sinner—“I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing.” When God has made me know what I am really like in His sight, it is no longer possible for me to be annoyed at what others may tell me I am capable of; God has revealed it to me already. When once we have had a dose of the plague of our own heart, we will never want to vindicate ourselves. The worst things that are said about us may be literally untrue; but we know that whatever is said is not so bad as what is really true of us in the sight of God.
Never try to prevent a soul feeling real disgust at what he is like in God’s sight. The first thing the Holy Spirit does when He comes in is to convict, not to comfort, because He has to let us know what we are like in God’s sight; and then He brings the revelation that God will fill us with His own nature if we will let Him.
The curious thing about the love of God is that it is the cruellest thing on earth to everything that is not of Him. God hurts desperately when I am far away from Him; but when I am close to Him, He is unutterably tender. Paul says that “God commendeth His own love toward us” (rv). God’s love seems so strange to our natural conceptions that it has to be commended, i.e. recommended, to us before we see anything in it. It is only when we have been awakened by conviction to the sin and anarchy of our hearts against God that we realise the measure of His love toward us, even “while we were yet sinners.” “The Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself for me”—Paul never lost the wonder of that love.
The Lord “suffereth long, and is kind. . . .” If I watch God’s dealings with me, I shall find that He gives me a revelation of my own pride and bad motives towards Him, and the realisation that He loved me when He could not begin to respect me will send me forth into the world to love others as He loved me. God’s love for me is inexhaustible, and His love for me is the basis of my love for others. We have to love where we cannot respect and where we must not respect, and this can only be done on the basis of God’s love for us. “This is My commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.”
Love means deliberate self-limitation; we deliberately identify ourselves with the interests of our Lord in everything. “Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” The revelation comes home to me that God has loved me to the end of all my meanness and my sin, my self-seeking and my wrong motives; and now this is the corresponding revelation—that I have to love others as God has loved me. God will bring around us any number of people we cannot respect, and we have to exhibit the love of God to them as He has exhibited it to us. Have we ever realised the glorious opportunity we have of laying down our lives for Jesus Christ? Jesus does not ask us to die for Him, but to lay down our lives for Him. Our Lord did not sacrifice Himself for death, He sacrificed His life, and God wants our life, not our death. “I beseech you,” says Paul, “present your bodies a living sacrifice.”
The greatest love of a man is his love for his friends (John 15:13); the greatest love of God is His love for His enemies (Romans 5:8-10††††††); the highest Christian love is that a man will lay down his life for his Friend, the Lord Jesus Christ—“I have called you friends.” Our Lord here connects the highest human love with the highest Divine love, and the connection is in the disciple, not in our Lord. The emphasis is laid on the deliberate laying down of the life, not in one tragic crisis such as death, but in the grey face of actual facts illumined by no romance, obscured by the mist of the utterly commonplace—expending the life deliberately day by day because of my love for my Friend. This is the love that never fails, and it is neither human nor Divine love alone, but the at-one-ment of both being made manifest in the life of the disciple, The supreme moment of the Cross in actual history is but the concentrated essence of the very nature of the Divine love. God lays down His life for the very creation which men utilise for their own selfish ends. The Self-expenditure of the love of God exhibited in the life and death of our Lord becomes a bridge over the gulf of sin; whereby human love can be imbued by Divine love, the love that never fails.
2. Love Where You Are Not Respected (1 Peter 2:20-21)
We shall not always be respected if we are disciples of Jesus. Our Lord said—“These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended. They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service,” and that will be so again. “The disciple is not above his Master.”†† How much respect did Jesus Christ receive when He was on this earth?
A Nazarene Carpenter, despised, rejected, and crucified. “We e’en must love the highest when we see it” is not true, for when the religious people of our Lord’s day saw the Highest Incarnate before them, they hated Him and crucified Him. “Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.”†† We are apt to think of a Christian merely as a civilised individual; a Christian is one who is identified with Jesus; one who has learned the lesson that the servant is not greater than his Lord.
If we are despised because we have extraordinary notions, we are apt to be uplifted by that; it suits our natural pride; but Jesus said—“Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake.”† If you want a good time in this world, do not become a disciple of Jesus. “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself,”†† i.e. give up his right to himself to Me. There is always an IF in connection with discipleship, and it implies that we need not unless we like. There is never any compulsion; Jesus does not coerce us. There is only one way of being a disciple, and that is by being devoted to Jesus.
3. Love Wherever Redemption Reaches (John 3:16)
What has God redeemed? Everything that sin and Satan have touched and blighted, God has redeemed; Redemption is complete. We are not working for the redemption of the world, we are working on the Redemption, which is a very different thing. Jesus Christ’s last command to His disciples was not to go and save the world; the saving is done. He told them to go and make disciples (rv). Our work is to “open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins,” i.e. that they may receive the Redemption which is complete but which is incredible to a man until he does receive it—“I do not doubt that God saves men; nor do I doubt that He can do all the Bible says He can; but it is ridiculous to suppose it includes me!.”
We have to beware of making the need the call; the Redemption is the call; the need is the opportunity, and the opportunity is in our own homes, in our work, just wherever we are, not simply in meetings. Naturally we always want to go somewhere else, but the love of God works just where we are, and His love works irrespective of persons.
Are we banking in unshaken faith on the Redemption of Jesus Christ? Is it our conviction amongst men that every man can be presented “perfect in Christ Jesus”? Are we filling up “that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ . . . for His body’s sake”? That means we have to be so identified with our Lord that His love is being poured out all the time, we have to be prepared to be nothing at all so that He can pour His sweetness through us. Neither natural love nor Divine love will remain unless it is cultivated. We must form the habit of love until it is the practice of our lives.