It is very important to enter into the truth, not only that love is of God and that He dwells in us who believe, but to understand that the love is the character of God Himself. “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:1616Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. (John 4:16)). This is something exceedingly beautiful to those who know it, and “he that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:88(For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat.) (John 4:8)).
What the Spirit of God speaks of in this epistle of John, as to our relationship with the Father, is surpassingly marvelous; God sent His Son that we might have life — a life that brings us into direct connection with the Father and the Son. Not only am I a son, but, being born of God, I have a new nature, and He tells me I am in His Son, who was before all worlds, and He in me. Think what a place He sees me in, and, mark, all God’s springs are in Himself. He saw nothing in man but hatred. It was love, divine love, that led Him to give His Son, and it was love that led that Son to come into this world. He puts this same love into the heart of him that tastes it. It is love that brings us into the presence of God Himself, a love that communicates the life of His Son to those dead in trespasses and sins, and they have a life that is locked up in the Son and never can be touched. Is it true that you can say, “That is the manner of life I have received — life hid with Christ in God”? If Christ Himself is my life, it links me up with Him, in whom is the whole bundle of life. The Head cannot say to the feet, “I have no need of thee.” It cannot say to the feeblest member, passing through the difficulties and sorrows of the wilderness down here, “I have no need of thee.” Why? Because it is bound up in the same bundle of life. Not only is that life brought out in all beauty in Him, who was with the Father, but that life has been communicated by the Father to us and is so in us that Christ cannot say He has no need of us.
Life With Him
Did you ever look up into the face of the Lord Jesus Christ with the consciousness of having one life with Him? If so, you cannot entertain a single question about the place you are in before God. In Eden all was very beautiful, and, looking around, man might have said, “What a large giver God is!” But surely we can say with deeper feeling, “What a blessed giver our God is!”
That life has flowed for over eighteen hundred years into the dead souls of sinners, and when we look, we find it has connected us with another scene altogether. We may say, I am very unlike Him whose life I have, but it is not a question of what you are, but of a portion that has flowed to you from the Father. Those whom God has given to Christ are so connected with Him, that the love wherewith He is loved is in them, and they are able to walk in the power of His life, unto His praise and glory, as dear children. Neither you nor I can say, “We love God with all our hearts and souls,” but we can say, “He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” If I begin with self, there is nothing but ruin. “Herein is love,” God says, “not your love to Me, but Mine to you; turn your eye to Christ, to see how I loved you and gave My Son for you.”
We Love Because He First
Loved Us
God cannot receive anything from a ruined creature, because it comes with a taint of sin and selfishness, but as accepted ones in the Beloved, is it not an expression of His love to put it into our heart to say, “We love Him, because He first loved us”? All the ruin and sin of the first Adam became the very occasion for all the love of God to flow out. If able to say, “I am a believer and a pilgrim,” I ought to be able to say, “I know what manner of love God has bestowed upon me.” The real claim of God’s love over them is never answered by the children of God, if they are not standing in it as the expression of it.
I am in a world where all are scrambling after what they can get for self. When Christ says, “I bought you with My own blood; I charged Myself with all your guilt,” are we to do or say anything that is not for the glory of that Christ? If God is working in us, having given us life in His Son, and says, “Now I am looking to see you walk like Christ,” are we never to think of His side? He alone is the channel by which God can bless you and answer every desire of your heart. “God is love,” but it is in and through Christ that He is this for us.
G. V. Wigram, adapted