Christ Shall Never Forget You

"If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." (John 14:-4).
"Love descends better than ascends. And so does the love of Christ, who indeed is love itself, and, therefore comes down to us himself . . . It is as if he had said, 'The truth is, I cannot live without you, I shall never be quiet till I have you where I am, that so we may never part again. Heaven shall not hold me, not my Father's company, if I have not you with me, my heart is so set upon you; and if I have any glory, you shall have part of it.'" (Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ).
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Real Love

Real love is not a warm fuzzy feeling for another person; it is doing concrete things for others. It is sacrificial, in as much as it is an expenditure of oneself for the good of another. This is the kind of love that God has displayed for us in the giving of his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:10).

2 John 6, says, "This is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands." Love is not self defined; it is God defined. It is not what I think or feel I should do on any given day of the week. It is what God has clearly commanded me to do and shown me to do in his Son, Jesus Christ.

Greg Forster writes in his book, The Joy of Calvinism, "A pastor of mine once said that love is not an emotion; love is a way of behaving. And it's a pretty difficult, strenuous form of behaviour under most circumstances! The emotional experience - the feeling - that we call love is supposed to come to us as the byproduct of loving behaviour. It's partly a support that helps us do the behaviour and partly a reward for doing the behaviour. To make the emotion the main thing you care about, and put the behaviour second - or worse, to want the emotion without the behaviour at all - Is selfish and deeply wicked. Yet that's what we all tend to do. When we separate the emotion of love from loving behaviour in our real relationships, things go off the rails pretty quickly. We get conflicts, we get coldness, we get resentment, we get betrayal. Above all, we discover that the emotional experience of love, which we wanted so badly, has itself disappeared or radically diminished."

This is the great tragedy of our self-absorbed culture. Those who claim to be the followers of Jesus Christ have been called to a deeper level of loving: to love in truth; guided by his absolute commands and Christ's sacrificial life.


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M2MS

"Love knows no law but the law of sacrifice." L.E.Maxwell (1 John 4:10; ROMANS 13:8).

Is God Self-Centered?

I have struggled with this question. God demands that his creatures give Him undivided worship and yet, when we humans have the desire for personal glory, He condemns us for being self-absorbed. The only way I have been able to justify this command is that He alone is worthy of such loyalty as the supreme being in the whole universe. All life finds its origin in Him, therefore all life should look to Him with complete devotion.

In reading Tim Keller's book, The Reason for God, he has helped me to see that I have understood this question simply from a monotheistic perspective. "Christianity alone among the world faiths, teaches that God is triune. the doctrine of the Trinity is that God is one being who exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The trinity means that God is, in essence, relational."

The Scripture describes these three persons living eternally in a community of mutual honour and joy. John especially paints a portrait of intimacy within the divine community (1:18; 16:14; 17:4-5). What does John mean when he says that the Father, Son, and Holy spirit glorify one another? "If we think of it graphically, we could say that self-centeredness is to be stationary, static. In self-centeredness we demand that others orbit around us. We will do things and give affection to others, as long as it helps us meet our personal goals and fulfills us.

"The inner life of the triune God, however, is utterly different. the life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom move around the other two. So it is, . . . each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love."

This truth has profound implications. "If God is triune, then loving relationships in community are the 'great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.' (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity). . . Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favour money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. . . . You will never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things. . . . The world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made."

Moreover, there is a greater personal significance in this truth. "Jonathan Edwards, in reflecting on the interior life of the triune God, concluded that God is infinitely happy. . . . because there is an 'other-orientation' at the heart of his being, because he does not seek his own glory but the glory of others."

This idea creates an apparent conflict with the many references in Scripture to God calling us to glorify and serve Him. The answer is resolved in the reason for this demand. "He wants our joy! He has infinite happiness not through self-centeredness, but through self-giving, other-centered love. And the only way we, who have been created in his image, can have this same joy, is if we center our entire lives around him instead of ourselves. . . . God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share in it. We were made to join in the dance. . . . We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go eternally, increasing unimaginably (1 Corinthians 2:7-10)."

How Long is the Love of Christ?

“Sometimes a man of God is, as he apprehends, so far off from God, that He can neither help him nor hear him. . . . He thinks himself beyond the reach of His mercy. In answer to this conceit, the LORD asks, ‘Is My arm too short to ransom you?’ (Isaiah 50:2).”

David had times when he supposed that for and by sin he was driven from God’s love: ‘O LORD, do not forsake me; be not far from me, O my God.’ (Psalm 38:21). Yet, the great shepherd king came to know the infinite presence of his God: ‘If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.’ (Psalm 139:9-10).

“O the length of the saving arm of God! . . . do not even attempt to compare arms with God . . . I mean, do not conclude that, because you cannot reach God with your short stump, therefore He cannot reach you with His long arm. Look again! Do you have an arm like God, an arm like His for length and strength? It is good for you, when you cannot perceive that God is within the reach of your arm, then to believe that you are within the reach of His; for it is long, and no one knows how long.”

Excerpts from John Bunyan’s All Loves Excelling.

How Wide is God's Love?

John Bunyan's work, The Saint's Knowledge of Christ's Love (All Loves Excelling), is an exposition of Ephesians 3:18-19. This is a prayer of the apostle Paul that we may know the unknowable love of Christ. That which is incomprehensible (Christ's love) may be understood to some degree as God reveals it to us. He mentions four dimensions of Christ's love: width, length, depth, and height.

How wide is God's love for me? "God is all over, everywhere, spreading his wings, stretching out his goodness to the uttermost bounds, for the good of those who are his people." God's love spreads out wide enough to cover the great expanse of my sin. "Blessed is he whose sin is covered, whose spreading sin is covered by the mercy of God through Christ."

For online works by John Bunyan check out these links: acacia.pair.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library; johnbunyan.org