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Loving Christ (Part 1) |
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By Ralph I. Tilley
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Four Hundred years ago, the devotional giant Frances de Sales wrote: "There is no need to pressure with rules and regulations anyone who loves. Love is the most pressing teacher of them all. The loving heart already urges to conform to the will and intentions of the beloved. Love is a magistrate with quiet authority. It needs no police force or army. Whoever takes pleasure in God will greatly desire to please God. Love is the condensation of all theology.”[1] In the previous three-part series, we saw how an earnest disciple of the Lord Jesus may cultivate and express a passionate love for him by becoming more intimately acquainted with him. In this series I want to explore what it means to love Christ, and how such a love relationship with the Lord Jesus can be cultivated into a greater intimacy. In John 15-23, Jesus' fundamental concern in his dialogue with Simon Peter that morning on Galilee's shore was, "Do you love me?"—"Do you love me with a divine love?" "Do you love me with a deep, personal affection and friendship?" The one love is agape; the other is philos.[2] The deepest, persistent need that every disciple of the Lord Jesus has is the need to be daily renewed by the Holy Spirit so one's love for Christ remains vitally and effectively alive. Christians have no greater challenge, no greater need. Nor did the first-century disciples. When Jesus located Simon Peter following His resurrection, the one question He raised with this defeated disciple had nothing to do with what Peter’s future ministerial statistical goals might be. Our Lord went to the very heart of Peter’s need because he knows what constitutes a dynamic, authentic relationship with himself. Thus Jesus asked, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?” While myriad religious, worthwhile pursuits may captivate the attention of the 21st century church, there is only one fundamental question our Lord asks us in the midst of our flurry of activities: “Do you love Me—right now, this very moment—are you passionately in love with ME?” During his all too-brief life, the Scottish pastor and evangelist, Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813-1843), had gained a reputation of personal piety and devotion to the Lord Jesus. His biographer, Andrew Bonar, said of M'Cheyne, "His constant holiness touched the conscience of many.”[3] Prior to his being taken suddenly ill, a visitor heard M'Cheyne preach what proved to be his last sermon and sent him a note of appreciation. However, the godly pastor never was able to read the correspondence because of his grave condition. Following his death the note was discovered and opened. It read: "I hope you will pardon a stranger for addressing to you a few lines. I heard you preach last Sabbath evening, and it pleased God to bless that sermon to my soul. It was not so much what you said, as your manner of speaking that struck me. I saw in you a beauty in holiness that I never saw before. You also said something in your prayer that struck me very much. It was, 'Thou knowest that we love Thee.' Oh, sir, what would I give that I could say to my blessed Saviour, 'Thou knowest that I love Thee!' “[4] The indictment Jesus brought against the Ephesian Church some thirty years after it was founded was: “you have left your first love.”[5] This church comprised many zealous, industrious members who were doctrinally sound, had no tolerance for wicked people, and enforced a rigid, external purity upon its members. But they were deficient; they were defective. They had lost something; they had left something. Jesus said that they had lost and left Someone—their first love—the Lord Jesus Christ. Christianity assumes a personal relationship—a relationship with the living Christ himself. The Scottish Bible teacher J. Sidlow Baxter saw this clearly when he wrote: “The Christian focus-point is not what Jesus taught, nor even what Jesus wrought, though both His teaching and His atoning sacrifice are surpassingly sublime. The vital centre is Jesus Himself—the virgin-born God-Man, the sinless Exemplar, the vicarious Sin-bearer, the resurrected Saviour, the ascended Intercessor, the omnipresent Indweller of His people, and the soon-returning Bridegroom of His Church.”[6] To this all the apostles and passionate lovers of Christ would attest. What does it mean to express genuine love for, and to, Christ? Reciprocating Christ's Love For Us To love the Lord Jesus Christ with both an agape and philos love is anything but loving him with a love that is soft, detached, and sentimental. It is loving Christ in return with the same quality of love wherewith he loved us while we were in our sins, and the same love he continues to manifest to his disciples through the Spirit. The fact is, Christians would be incapable of loving Christ if God had not first given to us his very own love by the Holy Spirit—"God's love [agape] has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”[7] This self-sacrificial, others-oriented love of God indwelling his people, enables God's children to offer up to Christ this very same love as they worship, follow and serve the Lord Jesus. This divine love, says Joseph Fitzmyer, is "the divine energy manifesting itself in an overwhelming embrace of once godless creatures who are smothered with his openness and concern for them. It is the manifestation of God's giving of himself without restraint, in a way unparalleled by any human love." Then speaking of the immensity and the inability to fully comprehend such love, Fitzmyer says furthermore, "It is impossible for a human being to imagine the dimensions or bounds of divine love; humanity knows of it only because God has graciously willed to pour it out and make it known.”[8] In contemplating the fathomless depths of this love God has showered upon sinners, Methodism's saintly hymn writer, Charles Wesley (1707-1788), wrote: God only knows the love of God; In writing about this love of God that is imparted to Christians by the Holy Spirit, which enables God's children to reciprocate such love, John of the Cross (1542-1591), a bright spiritual light in the tumultuous 1550s, uses the language of the Song of Solomon in describing the breadth of this love. He says when this love is poured into the hearts of God's people, every dimension of God's love enters: "Since your soul's Spouse, who walks and lives within you, is omnipotent, He gives you omnipotence as He loves you with all His might! And since He is Wisdom, you perceive that He is loving you in the highest and best ways—knowing His ways are above those of mere men. Since He is holy, He loves you with a love that is at work to set you apart for himself. Since He is righteous, He will love you in a way that leads you in His paths of righteousness. "And more—He that loves you is merciful, compassionate, meek. He is altogether strong, sublime, and delicate. He is a Lover who is clean, pure, and forever true. He loves you liberally, without self-interest, and with every intention to do good to you. "The One who loves you is humility itself. He thinks of you and cares for you with the highest esteem. He even makes himself your equal, and joyfully shows you every expression of His grace.”[10] Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ are not only enabled to love God because he has poured his love into their hearts; but, furthermore, we are able to love him because he loved us before we ever loved him—or could. In the words of the apostle of love himself: "We love because he first loved us.”[12] How did God perfectly reveal and demonstrate his ultimate expression of love for a sinful race? Two inspired apostles provide the answer. First, the apostle John: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son."12 "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 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.”[13] Secondly, the apostle Paul: "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”[14] The incarnation—God manifested in the flesh—and the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus are God's supreme gracious acts of love for sinners. Englishman Martyn Lloyd-Jones probed for an answer as to why God would demonstrate his love for sinful mankind as he did. He asked, "Why has God had anything to do with such creatures as men and women, dead in trespasses and sins, rebels—hating Him, being against Him, turning His world into a living hell? Why did God ever even look on them, let alone send His only begotten Son to them, and even to the cruel death and shame of the cross, making Him a sin offering? Why has God done this? What led Him to do it? What is this love of God, and wherein does it consist?" Lloyd-Jones then answered his rhetorical questions by citing the apostle John: "not that we have loved God, but that he loved us." Says Lloyd-Jones: "moved by nothing but His own self-generated love. Though we are what we are, God is love; and His great heart of love, in spite of all that is in us, unmoved by anything save itself, has done it all.”[15] Furthermore, it is possible for the disciples of the Lord Jesus to offer our love to him because he voluntarily offered himself up for us—the church—on Calvary's cross. God loved the world and demonstrated his love by sending his very own unique Son. But Christ offered his own body and life as a voluntary sacrifice for not only all of sinful, fallen mankind, but for the church. Paul makes three references to Christ's voluntary sacrificial offering for the church in Ephesians 3: Verse 2: "Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." Verse: 22: "Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior." Verse 25: "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." Without Christ's self-sacrificial offering for the church, the church could not reciprocate such love because the church would have been denied Christ's love manifested through his death and resurrection life. Because love—agape love—originates in the person and heart of God, and has been eternally expressed between the members of the triune God—unless it had been revealed to us through the Son by his death and resurrection, we could not love God nor his Son. Jesus loved the church—in life and in death. Recalling his Lord's last hours before his death while gathered with his disciples for a final meal, John writes, "when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”[16] Jesus loved the church in life; he loved the church in his death. Jesus' death not only provided an effective atonement for sin, but his sufferings and death provided an example of self-giving love to the church for all ages. In explaining the Ephesians 5 passage with respect to the self-sacrificial, offering of Christ, H. C. G. Moule says, "the business of this passage is with the Lord's Example, and it does not enter in detail into His Sacrificial work. . . . The supreme Act of self-devoting love for others which, as a fact, the Atoning Death was, is here used as the great Example of all acts of self-devoting love in the Christian Church. As the Father has just been named as the Ideal for the forgiving Christian, so here the Son is named as the Ideal for the self-sacrificing Christian.”[17] What a sublime thought. What a glorious fact! Charles Wesley would exulted, And can it be that I should gain Amazing love! How can it be, Samuel Stennett was moved to write, Since from His bounty I receive It has been the ardent desire of all earnest disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ though the ages to reciprocate such benevolent love expressed by God in his Son. From the apostles John, Peter, and Paul, to Polycarp, Crysostom, and Augustine, to Francis of Assisi, Savonarola, Luther, the Wesleys, Watts and Whitefield, to Pascal, Spurgeon, Brainerd, Livingston, Judson, Carey, and Taylor—these, and myriads more, have been offering back to the Son hearts of worship, lips of praise, and lives of service. Examples of Agape Love The apostle to the American Indians, David Brainerd (1718-1747), demonstrated an immense love for Christ. Ministering under extremely difficult conditions, as well as often ill in body, this passionate follower of the Lord Jesus was consumed with offering Christ his all in return for Christ's having given his all. For example (these are typical journal entries), a portion of Brainerd's journal entry for November 7, 1743, reads: "In the evening I enjoyed the same comfortable assistance in prayer as in the morning. My soul longed after God and cried to him with a filial freedom, reverence, and boldness. Oh, that I might be entirely devoted to God.”[20] His entry for July 3, 1744, reads: "Oh, it is sweet to be the Lord's, to be sensibly devoted to him! What a blessed portion is God! How glorious, how lovely in Himself!" Then, revealing that his love for God consisted in more than heart praise and worship, Brainerd confessed, "Oh, my soul longed to improve time wholly for God! Spent most of the day translating prayers into Indian.”[21] It was this love and devotion to Christ that compelled David Livingston (1813-1873) to return to his Lord the same love by investing his life as a medical missionary on the African continent for thirty-four years until his death. Livingston's life and career was forever changed after hearing African missionary Robert Moffat say in a missionary appeal—words that are now historic—"I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been.”[22] For most of his years in Africa Livingston's four children remained in England, with his wife often doing the same. The years of family deprivations and the accompanying loneliness, constant bouts of illness, a life that was often under threat from hostile natives, co-workers that were often less than faithful and ardent as Livingston was in his devotion to Christ, lacking the conveniences of modern life—all of these were counted as loss to Livingston for the sake of taking the love of Jesus to unreached and unsaved peoples. It was for the love of Christ that he taught and witnessed, translated and wrote, suffered and died. Noting a fever he was suffering and many obstacles he faced, Livingston wrote to his friend Arthur Tidman on October, 12, 1855, "These privations, I beg you to observe, are not mentioned as if I considered them in the light of sacrifices. I think the word ought never to be mentioned in reference to anything we can do for him who, though he was rich yet for our sakes he became poor.”[23] Writing once again to Tidman in 1856, Livingston reiterates his motive for passionate service for the Lord Jesus: "We still have a debt of gratitude to Jesus . . . and there is no greater privilege on earth than, after having our own chains broken off, to go forth to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”[24] Aspiring to Love Christ More The words written by Elizabeth Prentiss expressed not only her own soul thirst, but reflect the desire of all Christ's disciples who wish to live a life of passionate love for him—a love that fills Christ's true servants and friends: More love to Thee, O Christ, more love to Thee! This is my earnest plea: More love, O Christ, to Thee; - Soli Deo Gloria - Unless otherwise noted, the Bible version used in this article is the English Standard Version. |
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