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CAN CHRIST LOVE US LESS?
Spurgeon's sermon, "A Faithful Friend"
There cannot, by any possibility, arise any cause
which could make Christ love his children less.
You say, how is this?
One man loves his friend, but he suddenly grows rich,
and now he says I am a greater man than I used to be,
I will forget my old acquaintances.
But Christ can grow no richer--
he is as rich as he can be, infinitely so.
He loves you now; then it can not be possible that he will
by reason of an increase in his own personal glory forsake
you, for everlasting glories now crown his head. He can
never be more glorious and great, and therefore he will
love you still.
Sometimes, on the other hand, one friend
grows poorer, and then the other forsakes him.
But you never can grow poorer than you are,
for you are "a poor sinner and nothing at all" now;
you have nothing of your own; all you have is
borrowed, all given to you by him.
He cannot love you, then, less, because you grow poorer;
for poverty that has nothing, is at least as poor as it can
be, and can never sink lower in the scale.
Christ, therefore, must love you in spite of all your
nakedness and all your poverty.
"But I may prove sinful," you say.
Yes, but you cannot be more sinful than he foreknew you
would be; and yet he loved you with the foreknowledge of
all your sins. Surely, then, when it happens, it will occasion
no surprise to him; he knew it all beforehand, and he can
not swerve from his love.
No circumstance can possibly arise that ever will divide
the Saviour from his love to his people, and the saint from
his love to his Saviour.
He loved you for nothing at all-
simply because he would love you.
Well, that love which so lived on nothing but its own
resources, will not starve through the scantiness of your
returns.
The love which grew in such a rocky heart as this,
will not die for lack of soil.
That love which sprang up in the barren desert,
in your unirrigated soul, will never, never die for want of
moisture. It must live, it can not expire.
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