IF I had the opportunity, I should like to take... half a dozen men, men who can think clearly and practical men, and ask them, if I dared, “Do you really love Christ?” I wonder if the thing is known among us? Is it known? Are there in our Christian Churches large companies of men and women who can, with true full meaning, say, one by one, “I love Jesus Christ” I believe that those who kept the faith in the past, some of them whom I have known, could say it. I am coming to feel, more and more, that the religion of Jesus Christ is to be tested in this generation as it has never yet been tested. I believe this: that one generation dies for its faith, the next generation lives upon the faith of its fathers, and the next generation begins to die for its faith again. Where we are I am not quite sure. Thank God, in every generation there are those who keep the faith, and to whom Christ is very real and very precious; but in some of the generations these are not the many, but the few.
Looking back over the history of the Church, we make this startling discovery — that in the mind of the apostles, in the mind of the early Christian Church, in the mind of those who in every age revived the Christian religion, there existed as a very great reality, a passion of love for Christ. Think for a moment. Let us begin with the apostle. Peter cannot write a letter without his pen slipping on to this word — love for Jesus Christ, “whom,” he says, “having not seen, ye love.” And he knew them well. Again he said, “Unto you who believe, He is precious.” When we come to Paul, of course Paul’s great heart is one living flame.... “The love of Christ,” he says, explaining how it was that people counted him mad, “the love of Christ constraineth me. I am content to be counted mad.” “To me,” he said another time, “to live is Christ.”
We are not surprised to find that Christ expected such love. He said one day to those who were gathering about Him nibbling at His religion, hoping to get something good from it, hanging on to the fringe of His new faith, not willing to bear the cross after Him; to those He said, “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. He that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me.”... It may be that, pushed by life and life’s strenuous demands, and driven back against the experience of our sins and our sorrows, we would come one by one to confess, “yes, more than son or daughter, more than husband, more than wife, I love my Saviour.” That is the ideal that Christ has of His disciples. And it is when a man comes to that ideal that Christ puts His hand upon him and says, “now then, do My work.”
You ask why this is. Why is it other things will not do in the service? Why cannot a man be a servant, a worker for Christ, and yet not be a lover of Christ? The answer is that service follows loving.... Love is the thing that conquers self, and nothing else will. Love is the most potent of all the passions that sweep over our hearts.
It is imperative, if we are to love the Christ, that we conceive Him to be alive. Can we work back from our experience to the possession of this faith? Can we work back through our own experience to this position that the Christ is as much alive and as truly among us as our nearest friend?
In my despair... I worked it out like this: I started from the point of having the conviction in my head, but an absolute and utter want of conviction in my heart, that Christ was, and that I could touch Him with anything like affection. I worked at it from my latest experience of failure and of sin. That was my point of departure. That was my gateway to a new conviction, which I now have, that Jesus is. I looked at sin, and the horror of it made me look around for a Saviour. I knew better than to try to gain self-respect and a sense of purity by promises of amendment. Most men know better than that. I knew that there must be something to make God say to me, “You have sinned, but you are forgiven.” I looked around at the horizon of my experience. I looked in every direction. The whole world was blank, and I said, “There is none to whom I can appeal, unless this figure that moves toward me from that ancient history, this figure of the Sin-bearer, is real. If He is alive, if He can come to me and take my hand, and turn my face up to God, and say to God, ‘This is my brother, he is not to be condemned,’ then I can stand before God unafraid.” This was where I found the Christ, living and to be loved, and it dawned upon me that this was where that greater man than I found Him. This was the spot where the apostle who loved Him so passionately found Him “who loved me and gave Himself for me.” This is where the Christian Church finds Christ, at the spot where guilt is lifted off and a sense of cleanness comes in. If you don’t know that, you never really loved Christ. You may pay your money out for His cause. For your father’s and mother’s sake, for the sake of all that have gone before you, or for sheer honor’s sake, you may serve truly and long; but you have never known the glad service that comes from love until, in the hour of your self-condemnation, there moves to your side the Bearer of men’s sins, and you feel that He has borne away your sin, too....
Why is it that love is so important in this service? Don’t you see? Why won’t money do? Oh, don’t you know? You are trying to help the poor with money — you are hurting them. You are trying to help the sick by gifts—no good. You are trying to make the world better by everything but love; and only love can feed the hearts of men, only love can feed the lambs and feed the sheep. So, because they are dying for love, yearning for love, forsaken for love, darting from God for want of love, lovers are sent to them, lovers feed them, lovers tenderly heal their wounds. “Lovest thou Me, Peter?” “Yes, my Lord.” “Then I can trust you with the broken hearts of the world.” “Lovest thou Me, thou son of John?” “Lord, Thou knowest I love Thee.” “Then I can trust the deniers with you, all these poor sheep of mine with you, because you have a tender, loving heart.” You can do much with your gifts, with your powers, with your other things. I would not despise them; but you will not touch one of the sheep or one of the lambs, you will not help any of the broken hearts, unless you have in you the heart of a lover of Jesus Christ.
RALPH CONNOR.