Saturday, May 31, 2008

"Herein is Love" - Thoughts from Spurgeon

The other day I borrowed Humility and How to Get It - by Charles Spurgeon from our church library. (Humility is something I dearly need more of.) The book is a collection of Spurgeon's sermons, many on humility. The first sermon, however, is on love. I appreciated one of Spurgeon's colorful illustrations:
I am looking for "the springs of the sea," and you point me to a little pool amid the rocks which has been filled by the flowing tide. I am glad to see that pool: how bright! how blue! how like the sea from whence it came! But do not point to this as the source of the great waterfloods; for if you do I shall smile at your childish ignorance, and point you to yon great rolling main which tosses its waves on high. What is your little pool to the vast Atlantic? Do you point me to the love in the believer's heart, and say, "Herein is love!" You make me smile. I know that there is love in that true heart; but who can mention it in the presence of the great rolling ocean of the love of God, without bottom and without shore? The word not is not only upon my lip but in my heart as I think of the two things, "NOT that we loved God, but that God loved us." What poor love ours is at its very best when compared with the love wherewith God loves us!...I do rejoice in the love of saints to their Lord. Yet this is but a streamlet; the unfathomable deep, the eternal souce from which all love proceeds, infinitely exceeds all human affection, and it is found in God, and in God alone.


"In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."
- 1 John 4:10 ESV

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