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Loving God deeply
from Spurgeon's sermon, "LOVE'S LOGIC"
To feel love to God we must tread along the 'road of faith'.
Truly, this is not a hard or perilous way, but one prepared
by infinite wisdom. It is a road suitable for sinners, and
indeed saints must come that way also.
If you would love God, do not look within you to see
whether this grace or that be as it ought to be, but look
to your God, and read his eternal love, his boundless love,
his costly love, which gave Christ for you; then shall
your love drink in fresh life and vigor.
Beloved, there are few of us who know much of the depths
of the love of God; our love is shallow; ah, how shallow!
Love to God is like a great mountain--
The majority of travelers view it from afar, or traverse the
valley at its base: a few climb to a halting place on one of
its elevated spurs, whence they see a portion of its sublimities:
here and there an adventurous traveler climbs a minor peak,
and views glacier and alp at closer range; fewest of all are
those who scale the topmost pinnacle and tread the virgin snow.
So it is in the Church of God--
Every Christian abides under the shadow of divine love: a few
enjoy and return that love to a remarkable degree: but there
are few, in this age sadly few, who reach to seraphic love,
who ascent into the hill of the Lord, to stand where the eagle's
eye has not seen, and walk the path which the lion's whelp has
never trodden, the high places of complete consecration and
ardent self-consuming love.
Now, mark you, it may be difficult to ascend so high, but there
is one sure route, and only one, which the man must follow who
would gain the sacred elevation. It is not the track of his works,
nor the path of his own actions, but this, "We love him because
he first loved us." John confessed that in this way he attained
his love for God. For the highest love that ever glowed in
human bosom there was no source but this- God first loved that man.
Do you not see how this is?
The knowledge that God loves me casts out my tormenting dread of God:
and when this is expelled, there is room for abounding love to God.
As fear goes out, love comes in at the other door.
So the more faith in God the more room there is for soul-filling love.
Our soul is satisfied with marrow and fatness when we know that the
whole heart of God beats towards us as forcibly as if we were the only
creatures he had ever made, and his whole heart were wrapt up in us.
Love to God produces a desire to be with him; a desire to be like him,
a longing to be with him eternally in heaven, and this breaks us away
from worldliness; this keeps us from idolatry, and thus has a most
blessedly sanctifying effect upon us, producing that elevated character
which is now so rare, but which wherever it exists is powerful for the
good of the church and for the glory of God.
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