LOVE begets love. “We love Him because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:1919We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19).) The love of God to us, sinful as we are, enemies as we are to Him by wicked works, opens our hearts to Him. “Herein is love, not that we loved God; but that He loved us, and sent His Son, the propitiation for our sins” (ver. 10). The presence of sin in the human heart repels God from our thoughts. His name, which we know to be holy, is a terror to us naturally, and were it not that God has opened the way back to Himself, we should never draw near to Him. We need not look into our hearts for the feeling of love to God, for herein is love, not that we loved God, but we do need with all our being to look into the heart of God, for “He loved us, and sent His Son, the propitiation for our sins.”
We note how our hearts, God’s heart, and our sins are associated together. As to our hearts, they are destitute of love to God; as to God’s heart, it abounds in love to us; and His abounding love is witnessed by His sending His Son who made atonement for our sins.
God’s love and God’s holiness are seen in blessed unison on Calvary. “He loved us; His Son, the propitiation for our sins.” God Himself, impelled by His own compassion towards sinful and perishing man to send His Son, the only One able to meet the awful necessity of our sins. The cross of our Lord Jesus most perfectly expresses the love and the holiness of God, and when we rise in faith and “love God because He first loved us,” the heart is unlocked, and the mystery of the gospel becomes our own portion.
Love is essentially individual. Love in the abstract, a general but not particular love, is really no love at all. It is a semblance of the reality in words, it is not in any degree like the reality in fact. Hence, when the apostle says, “We love God,” he really means what he says. We do not love a person of whom we can never think, and do not care to hear, and to whom we never speak; therefore we can with ordinary intelligence discover if we love God. The very burden of the distressed heart which fears it does not love God is a symptom of genuine affection. The lamentation of the soul over its deadness to God proves that that soul longs after Gad. But the easy-going and indifferent, who have no exercises of spirit whatever, should awake to real earnestness, for in thorn it seems impossible that love to God exists.
How shall I attain to having my heart filled with love to God? is a question not infrequently put by true people. We should reply, in the same way as a pitcher under a fountain attains to being filled with the sparkling water. The province of the pitcher is not to produce water but to hold it. The believer is but a vessel for the reception of the divine fullness, and our way to be filled is first, not to be full of ourselves, and next, to give ourselves to God to be filled.
Our efforts to produce love are often no better than filling up the pitcher with little stones, each one of which takes up the place of so much water, “Because He first loved us!” Let us meditate upon these words, and seek to enter into the reason of our love to God, “because He first loved us.”