Let us turn this morning to John 13. We will read the first verse from this chapter. We know the setting here: our Lord is preparing for that Last Supper with His dear ones.
Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end.
Or, you can read that last phrase, “He loved them to the uttermost.”
Lord, we are so thankful that, in the spirit of that jubilee of the wonderful victory that we have in You, Lord, we can continue in Your presence. Lord, we are so thankful for the provision we have in Christ Jesus. We are thankful for the Holy Spirit, the enabling power that You have given to us so freely. We are thankful for Your Word.
And, Lord, we do look unto You to breathe upon this time, that in that heart of love that You have to woo us unto Yourself in a fuller and greater way, our hearts would be drawn to You. Our hearts would be open, and there would be nothing between us—nothing that would allow Your Word to be hindered in this way.
We are thankful, Lord, for the blood of the Lamb that cleanses us from all of our sins and unrighteousness. We come, giving ourselves unto You today, in Thy precious name. Amen.
As I was thinking about the days that we are living in, obviously they are days of crisis, and nobody has to tell us that. I was drawn to this Scripture in John 13 because the disciples were getting ready to go through the most tremendous crisis of their lives.
These dear ones had really forsaken everything. They had left their families, their homes, and their occupations because they had been captured by One. One had come and spoken to each one of them and said, “Come, follow Me.” In various stages and in various ways, these precious disciples came and followed our Lord and put everything else behind them.
Yet, even though He was telling them that He was going to have to go away and would be crucified, the reality of it was not sinking in. Even when you are told something ahead of time, until you experience it, you really do not know what you are going to have to go through.
People ask, “How would you handle an earthquake?” Well, until a few weeks ago, most people in Virginia had no idea. They think they would act this way or that way, but until you actually go through something, you do not know how you are going to act. It is in the midst of the crisis that reality is revealed.
Our Lord Jesus was getting ready to prepare His disciples for the crisis of their lives. He came unto them in this chapter, and what He spoke to them and did for them really prepared them. What He was speaking to them is what prepares our hearts as well.
We are living in days of tremendous crisis. It seems as though the world changes overnight, and everything spreads so quickly. We can have an occupation on Wall Street, a group of people protesting, and all of a sudden—boom—it spreads all over the world. Things happen rapidly in these last days. We see the chaos.
Far more concerning in my own heart is not so much the world but the church and God’s people. We are in a crisis in these days. It is tragic how many things bear the name of Christian and Christianity, yet are so far away from what is really upon His heart and according to His desire.
We are in a day of crisis and a day of great shaking. But praise God, as we heard last week, we can be thankful for the shaking because it shows us what cannot be shaken. It removes all the other stuff in our lives, if we can see that shaking as the love of the Lord.
As our Lord was preparing His dear disciples, He wants to prepare us in the same way. He prepared His disciples by loving them to the uttermost.
He loved them to the uttermost. Brothers and sisters, what will get us through in this day and time is really knowing the love of Christ in a fresh and real way—not merely knowing about Him, not merely knowing all of His teachings, though those things are important.
There is one thing that is really necessary: allowing the love of Christ to capture us in an uttermost way. I like that word, uttermost. The margin also says “eternally,” because the New American Standard reads, “He loved them to the end.” I do not like that as much, because it sounds as though you are putting a boundary or limit on God’s love. We know His love does not have an end.
G. Campbell Morgan translates that little verse in his commentary on John: “He loved them all the way through.” All the way through. Brothers and sisters, that is what He did with the disciples, and that is what He does with us.
He loves us all the way through—through whatever we go through, whatever is out there. He loves us all the way through it. He is there to care for us, and He sees us all the way through that.
When we think of the love of Christ, I am drawn to Psalm 139:8-10. To me, this speaks of the vastness of Christ’s love. The love of Christ is with a purpose: the purpose of wooing and drawing us unto Himself, so that He can complete within us the work that He has begun.
This passage parallels Ephesians 3:18, which speaks of the breadth, length, height, and depth of His love.
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall Thy hand lead me,
And Thy right hand shall hold me.
“If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there.” Does that not speak of the height of God’s love? If we are in the heavens with Him, in that wonderful presence of the Lord, He is there.
I think of Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. He was captured by that scene and overwhelmed by everything that he saw, so much so that he became distracted. But God intervened and, in effect, said, “Keep your eye on My Son, Peter. Do not worry about Moses and Elijah. There is One whom you need to look at.” And he saw Jesus only.
Even the blessings of God can distract us from Christ Himself. As we experience the heights of His love, may we not take our eyes off our precious One, who first loved us.
Then Psalm 139 says, “If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there.” I think that is one of the greatest verses in Scripture, because if we are honest, every one of us, at some point, has made our bed in hell. We have made a mess of our lives. We have screwed up; we have messed up.
But praise God for the depth of His love—not only the height, but the depth to which He will go to bring us back to Himself. The enemy will lie and say, “You have done something so bad that there is no hope for you.” But praise God, brothers and sisters, the depth of the love of God will reach down and draw us back.
We cannot carelessly use this as an excuse to do whatever we want, thinking that He will bring us back. No. But once we see that the love of Christ has captured us, how can we ever let Him go? He never lets us go, but tragically, we often end up letting Him go.
The psalm continues: “If I take the wings of the morning,” showing the breadth of His love; “if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,” showing the length of His love. The height, depth, breadth, and length of His love reveal how far He will go.
“Even there Thy hand shall lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” Praise God for that nail-pierced hand. Wherever we are, His hand lays hold of us, guides us, and leads us.
His hand is holding us and leading us because He has a purpose. He is not loving us merely so that we will know His love. He is loving us so that we will respond to that love and allow Him to conform us to His image. He desires a people prepared, a people who would hasten His return in this day and hour.
When we think of the love of Christ, we often ask, “What is the love of Christ?” It has been said that we really cannot define the love of Christ, because to define it is to confine it. How can we set bounds upon the love of Christ?
All we can do is describe the love of Christ. And when we think of that love, we must look at the person of our Lord Jesus. When we think of the love of Christ, we look at Him, because He is love. It is His very life, and that is what He wants us to behold.
Sometimes we look at the love of Christ through rose-colored glasses and think it is all beautiful, wonderful, warm, and cozy. Praise God, it is. But there is also a side to the love of Christ that we see in His life.
He was so captured by love for the Father that He left the splendor of heaven and came into this earth in humility, born in Bethlehem. When we think of being loved, we do not necessarily like humility. Humility does not come naturally to us. We want to be seen; we want people to notice us.
But when we are captured by the love of Christ, humility begins to come forth—not from ourselves, but as His character is expressed in us. Our Lord, because of His great love for His Father, was willing to live those years in hiddenness. It may have appeared that He was doing nothing upon the earth, yet the Father was working in a mighty way.
Then He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. He suffered rejection. That is the love of Christ, brothers and sisters. So often, when we share something or do something for someone and it is rejected, our love ends right there. But the Lord came unto His own, His own received Him not, and that did not impact His love in any way.
He continued loving to the uttermost. He loved all the way to Gethsemane, where He could pray, for our sake, for His Father’s sake, and for the church’s sake, “Not My will, but Thy will, be done.”
Are we captured by the love of Christ in such a way that we are saying, “Not my will” in this hour? We are such strong-willed people. But the Lord says that the way we enjoy the full jubilee and victory we have in Him is by saying, “Not my will, but Thy will, be done.”
Then He went to Calvary, the greatest display of love in the history of the universe. When we see the love of Christ working in us and being manifest through us, it leads us to the cross. It brings a great conflict between our self-love and the love of Christ.
That love of self, which wants its own way, is brought into conflict with the love of Christ. Praise God, there is victory. As we remembered at the table this morning, the love of Christ has overcome. We can say no to self. We can daily allow the cross to work within us.
Just as our Lord Jesus ended up on the throne, we end up in the very presence of God. We enjoy the victory of the love of Christ. There is that jubilee and victory that we have in Him, and we are so thankful for it.
But so often we want the victory of Christ without being willing to walk the way of Christ. If we are going to make it through to the end and enter into the fullness of all that He has called us unto, it is not only the victory that we see, but the way that we see. What allows us to go that way is His love controlling us and prevailing within our hearts.
As we consider this, I have three questions that I would like for us to consider:
Are we conscious of His love? Perhaps you say, “Why do you need to ask that question? We are Christians. We all know the love of Christ. We would not be here if we did not know the love of Christ.”
But the real question is whether the love of Christ is being seen within our lives. Do we merely know it in our heads, or are we conscious of the love of Christ every day of our lives, allowing it to impact us in a wonderful way?
We have all of history against us. One of the greatest love stories we can see is the Old Testament. Throughout that Testament, the Lord loved His people, yet they turned around and turned their backs on Him.
We have been studying Genesis. From the beginning, in the garden, we see His love for all that He desired to accomplish in His purpose. But we see man sinning and forsaking Him. Did that end God’s love? No. We see a great redemption.
Eventually, they ended up in Egypt. Praise God, the Lord delivered them from Egypt. Did they remember that? So quickly, they forgot that love. They remembered the leeks and garlic of Egypt, and they murmured in the wilderness.
Again, they experienced His wonderful love as they entered the promised land. But what did they do? What do we do? We worship other gods and become disobedient. Yet God, in His wonderful love, continued through all the trials.
He brought His kingdom in under David and Solomon. The splendor and glory of God appeared upon the earth, and the glory of God came and tabernacled among men in that glorious temple. But it was not many years later before, instead of Solomon and the glory of God, there was Ahab and Jezebel. How quickly we fall and forsake the love of Christ.
At the end of the Old Testament, in Malachi, the Lord said, “I have loved you.” How did the people respond? “How hast Thou loved us?” The Lord had kept them through all that they had been through and brought them back to the promised land. They had experienced His faithfulness, yet they challenged Him and said, “How hast Thou loved us?”
They were not conscious of His love. Because they were not conscious of His love, they were not conscious of their true condition. When we are conscious of the love of Christ, we also become conscious of our condition. In His light, we see light. We see truth and reality.
So often we think something is wrong with God, that He has left us and forsaken us. But no, we have drifted, and we are not seeing our true condition.
At the end of the New Testament, the Lord challenges the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:4: “Thou didst leave thy first love.” They were totally stunned.
What does this matter of first love mean? To me, first love is simply being aware of how He first loved us—being aware of His love, responding to it, and being captured by it. It is not a quality that we possess; it is our response to His love.
Thomas Manton, the Puritan writer, said, “Love is like an echo; it returns to where it came from.” The Lord has poured out His love upon us. As we have remembered Him at this table, He is simply looking for a response, a return back to Him.
It is allowing His love to come in, to come through us, and to return to Him. That is what holds us to the end. That is what will keep us.
It is not our love for Him that keeps us. Yes, we should love Him, but our love has limits and bounds. We saw that in Peter’s life. Peter said, “Lord, I will love You to the end. I will die for You.” How quickly he denied Him. Our natural love comes to an end pretty quickly.
But praise God, the love of God knows no bounds. It continues, and it woos us unto Himself. The believers at Ephesus were shocked because outwardly they were doing everything a good church should do. They had meetings, good teaching, and everything seemed right outwardly. But their hearts had drifted away.
They could give good messages and pray great prayers, but where were they in reality? The Lord was trying to woo them back. He said, “I am after your hearts. I am after being in that place of first love.”
It is not merely honoring Him one day a week, or even on other gathering days. It is honoring Him with your life and allowing His life to have the preeminent place throughout your day, your week, and your whole life.
That old hymn says, “Prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.” We have to face that. If we do not realize the capability of our own nature to leave the One we love, we are doomed to failure. But if we can say, “Yes, Lord, that is me. I can be like anybody else who has experienced Your love and left You. Lord, I am depending upon You,” then we are in the right place.
The Lord loved those disciples to the uttermost so that whatever they went through would prepare them and keep them. The love of Christ will keep us in the same way.
The greatest safeguard we have is realizing that we are no different from those in Scripture who fell away. If we think we stand, we know where that leads. But praise God, we have this wonderful provision in Christ. He has made every provision so that we can get through everything—not somehow, but triumphantly in Him.
The battle we face is not the battle without, but the battle within. The battle over the love of Christ is a battle within our hearts over who is going to sit on the throne. Who will control our lives? Will we pursue the things that we love and want, or will we allow the love of Christ to do its wonderful work of conforming us to His image?
We can become so familiar with things that we are not even aware of them. I remember being in Seattle, Washington, a few years ago. It was a clear day—a miracle in itself, you know, because it rains all the time in Seattle. It is really a pretty dreary place. People do not live there; they just move away from Seattle.
I am just kidding. Let me redeem myself: Seattle is a beautiful place. The sunshine is there a lot of times. It was a beautiful, clear day, and a brother was taking us around.
All of a sudden, we could see Mount Rainier in front of us. It was so majestic—this huge, snow-capped mountain. It looked unreal. As we drove toward Rainier, we looked over and saw the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic Mountains, all snow-capped. It was beautiful. It put Richmond to shame.
My neck was getting a crick in it because I was looking this way and that way. But I noticed the brother driving the car was just driving along. I said, “Why are you not looking? Do you not see that?” He said, “Look at what?”
He had become so accustomed to it that he did not even notice. It did not catch his attention. We can do the same thing with the love of Christ.
The love of Christ can become so familiar to us. We say, “Oh yes, praise God, there is the love of Christ. Our brother can see again. So-and-so has a new job. This sister is taken care of. Praise God for this and that.” But it becomes so common to us.
Have we lost the preciousness of the love of Christ? Would the Lord awaken us to see it? He manifests the love of Christ around us all the time in many different ways, but do we even see it?
It is not that the Lord is unwilling to show us His love. He is showing us His love in many ways. But we get distracted by other things. We need to choose to respond and say, “Lord, I want to see Your love.”
That is one reason I am so thankful that we are able to have this table every Lord’s Day. We remember that love, and it brings us back into focus. It puts everything back into the right perspective.
Would we become more and more conscious of the love of Christ? That is what will hold us in these days. That is what will keep us. He is the One who has kept us, provided our daily bread, provided our health, and given us everything we need for life and godliness in Christ Jesus.
The second question concerns the character of Christ’s love. We could go on forever discussing the characteristics of God’s love. This is not a full exposition; it is simply a few points that have touched me. I believe we will be exploring the character of God’s love throughout eternity.
When we consider John 13, we see our Lord knew what was ahead. He knew that He would soon be arrested. He knew that ten disciples would desert Him, one would deny Him, and one would betray Him. He knew He would have to go to Calvary. His eyes were wide open.
He knew these dear ones—their weaknesses, frailties, inconsistencies, and all—and yet He loved them to the uttermost. A. W. Pink said that the love of Christ is uninfluenced. It is not influenced by us, circumstances, time, or place. The love of Christ is absolute. He loves us because He loves us. That is His character and nature.
We are so influenced in our love. We often think a mother’s love for her child is the finest picture of love upon this earth, and it is precious. But if you ask most mothers, at some point they become exasperated with those little ones whom they love.
Praise God, our Lord does not become exasperated with us. He grieves; He is saddened. But it does not influence His love for us. He goes on and on.
The circumstances of life do not influence His love. He is the One who has a crisis before Him, yet He is not thinking of Himself. He is thinking of others. That touches me about the character of Christ’s love: in the midst of crisis, He is not caring for Himself; He is caring for others.
It reminds me of Joseph in prison. Joseph was in prison for something he had not done. He was falsely there. Then the baker and cupbearer were thrown into prison as well. Joseph himself was suffering, yet he was serving them.
One morning Joseph noticed that their faces looked different. He took notice. He was not so self-occupied with his own situation that he failed to see the condition of others. He reached out and cared for them.
Brothers and sisters, when we are going through things, we can become so occupied with our own situations that we fail to see the conditions of others. Would the love of Christ grow in our hearts, opening our eyes to get them off ourselves and to care for what the Lord would have us care for?
Jesus will love His people to the utmost end of their unloveliness. Our sinfulness cannot travel so far that His love will not travel beyond it and bring us back. No matter how far our sin goes, His love goes a little further. He is there, and He woos us back.
We can each testify personally that when we have gone down a wrong path and made wrong choices, the love of Christ eventually came in and wooed us back. He woke us up, and we came back.
It is not a matter of whether we will fall, sin, or get off the wrong path at times. It is a matter of when. That is our nature. We are sinners, and we will mess up. But praise God, the love of Christ goes further. It woos us and brings us back.
The enemy says, “Look what you have done. There is no place for you in the house of God.” But, brothers and sisters, there is. His table has a seat for each and every one of us. In the Lord’s house, He desires that each one of us live in the fullness of His goodness. Would we allow the love of Christ to woo us back to Himself?
I was reading about the love of Christ, and one brother said that Jesus is the best example of love. As I read that, I thought, something is not right. Jesus is not merely an example of love. Jesus is love.
Christ Jesus is love. He is not simply an example of it. Love is His very character and nature, and that is the life living within us—the life that woos us, draws us back to Him, conforms us to His image, and leads us to become a people prepared to hasten His return.
Modern society has often reduced love to some gushy, mushy idea that says Jesus loves everything and simply accepts everything. But His love has been watered down. There is a fullness to His love that the enemy and modern society have robbed from us.
Praise God, He is tenderhearted, patient, kind, longsuffering, and humble. But there is also what we might call the hard side, or perhaps the tough side, of His love. Yet I have difficulty placing an adjective on love, because love is love. There is not soft love versus hard love. It is His love, expressed in different aspects.
There is comfort in His love, but there is also a hand that disciplines us.
Consider Hebrews 12:5-6.
My son, regard not lightly the chastening of the Lord,
Nor faint when thou art reproved of Him;
For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
And scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.
Because He loves us so much, He disciplines us. He is training us. In modern Christianity, is that considered love? Is that the message we hear so much today? We do not hear it often.
But brothers and sisters, the Lord is jealous for sons. He desires to bring many sons into glory and to conform us to His image. In the training process, there is discipline. Out of love, He tells us, “No, you cannot do that. That part of your character is not right. It is not in conformity with My character, and I want to touch it.”
That anger, that temper, that gluttony—there are things in our lives that the Lord touches. It is interesting: you do not hear too many sermons on gluttony. After we have our big love feast, that subject is kind of off limits. But we always talk about all the other things.
The Lord touches us because He loves us. He knows that when the going gets tough and the crisis ahead comes, if we do not have these things settled now, they will become stumbling blocks. We will trip over them. They will become weights and entanglements.
But praise God, in His love, He shines the light into our lives and says, “You need to get free of that. You need to get free of that. You love this too much. You love this more than Me.”
It is a hard saying when He says that if we want to be His disciple, we cannot love father, mother, sister, or brother more than Him. But He must be ultimate. The love of Christ must absolutely capture and control our hearts, because any other love upon this earth can distract us and lead us away in difficult times.
There is another aspect of His love. In Philippians 1:9-10, Paul says:
And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment;
So that ye may approve the things that are excellent;
That ye may be sincere and void of offence unto the day of Christ.
He is speaking of agape love, the love of Christ in our hearts. He wants that love to abound in real knowledge—experiential knowledge—and discernment. We often separate love, knowledge, and discernment, but these are matters of the heart.
This knowledge is heart knowledge. It is like Solomon praying, “Give Thy servant therefore an understanding heart.” We need a hearing heart and a discerning spirit.
So often in Christianity today, we are told that we must accept everything that bears the name of the Lord or the name Christian. But the Lord says, “No. You need to be wise in these days. You need to discern the things that are truly of Me and the things that are not.”
Some things come from man’s flesh. Some things may come from the enemy while using His name. We need to be wise. Our Lord was wise as He walked upon the earth. At times, it may have seemed strange how He answered people, but there was discernment.
Nicodemus came to Him, and the Lord spoke of being born again. He brought him back to the reality of what was essential. In modern society, we can be so “open-minded” that we think we must accept everything. But the Lord says, “This is what is essential. This is what is necessary.”
If His love—His life within us—is controlling us, there will be knowing and discernment concerning what is of Him and what is not. We will not be led astray, though many may come in His name.
His love is holy. There is a holiness to His love. Today, brothers and sisters, much of the holiness of Christ’s love has been lost. Holiness is not a popular word. We often equate holiness with legalism.
But there is nothing further apart than those two things. The way man and man’s systems try to implement holiness may be legalism, but true holiness in the Holy Spirit is glorious liberty in the sons of God.
That liberty is not freedom to do what we want to do. It is freedom to do whatever He wants us to do. The liberty of the sons of God is the liberty to obey our Master.
We see His holiness expressed in His love for His house when He cleansed the temple. There was such jealousy and zeal that He could not stand what He saw. “This is My Father’s house.”
How the house of God has lost so much of its holiness today. He dealt with sinners, and He despised sin. He told them, “Go, and sin no more.” He did not coddle them. There was holiness in His love.
The more we experience the love of Christ, the more we learn the fear of God. Do you know why the fear of God has been lost among believers today? It is because we have lost the love of God.
If we truly see the love of Christ, there will be learned within us a reverential, awesome fear of the Lord—not being afraid of Him, but being so in love with Him that we have no desire to disappoint Him or come up short.
We will never know the fear of God unless we first know the love of God. Would the Lord work that great restoration within our hearts, drawing and wooing us back to Himself and conforming us to His image?
There is so much of the character of His love that He wants us to learn, and He gives us an opportunity every day to learn it. He wants us to learn these things so that we can be controlled by Him—controlled by His love.
Who are we controlled by? It is interesting to see how the love of Christ captured and worked within the disciples in different ways.
Peter came to accept the love of Christ through his failings and sin. In Luke 5, Peter and the others had been fishing all night and caught nothing. The Lord told him to go out again and cast the nets.
Halfheartedly, Peter said, “Since You are asking me, I will do it.” He was not expecting anything. But he went out, cast the net, and it became so full that the nets began to break.
How did Peter respond? He said, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Peter could not accept that God loved him because of his own sins and failures. He was so convicted.
But in reality, Peter was like a little child. He said, “Depart from me,” but he was really calling the Lord to hold him tighter. It was like saying, “Get away from me, but do not really get away from me. Do not touch me, but hold me tighter.”
He was conflicted. Yet in spite of himself, the love of God for him—the love of Christ—was capturing him. Do we know that the Lord loves us in spite of ourselves? If we see that, it will capture us, control us, govern our lives, and lead us into right decisions.
Romans 5 gives us this wonderful, encouraging word: God did not wait for us to get better or do something for Him. He demonstrated His love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
He wants to demonstrate that love in our lives every day in a fresh and living way—not merely as a historical verse that we can quote, but as an experiential reality within our lives.
Later, Peter told the Lord, “I will love You. I will die for You. I will never deny You.” Then he denied Him. Peter’s natural love had to come to an end so that the all-sufficiency of the love of Christ could control his life.
At that point, Peter denied the wrong Man. But later, Peter denied the right man and suffered a martyr’s death. The first time, Peter loved his own life. The second time, he loved not his life unto death. He was captured and controlled by the love of Christ.
We often think of the Apostle John as the apostle of love, but we forget what the Lord originally called him: a son of thunder. The Lord took a son of thunder and made him an apostle of love.
He can take each one of us. We are sons of thunder. When someone does something that we do not like, we want to call down thunder and lightning upon them. We may have our good Christian facades up and do it privately rather than publicly, but in our hearts we may be calling down lightning upon that person.
Praise God, He can take a son of thunder and change him into a son of His love.
John was exiled on the Isle of Patmos because of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus. But in spite of that exile, John knew the love of Christ constraining him. He knew that love was capturing him.
As John was there on that isle, the love of Christ grew greater and greater. He could see the love of Christ holding him in a fuller and greater way, and he experienced that love to the uttermost.
Paul testifies in 2 Corinthians that he was controlled by the love of Christ. He says, “For the love of Christ constraineth us.” Throughout 2 Corinthians, Paul testifies of the all-sufficiency of the love of Christ through afflictions, persecutions, despair, disappointments, and everything else.
Brothers and sisters, just as Paul experienced the love of Christ, we can experience it through whatever we go through. The love of Christ sometimes gets us out of situations; praise God, it does. But other times, the love of Christ keeps us through the situation.
Consider Isaiah 43:2.
When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.
As we pass through the trials of life, the love of Christ that loves us to the uttermost loves us all the way through those things. It keeps us through them.
Sometimes we think there is no end to the trials. Sometimes we cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we can see Him.
What are we looking for in the midst of a crisis, brothers and sisters? So often, we are looking for a way out. We are looking for the end, and I understand that. It is the first thing we ask: “How do I get out of this situation? When is it going to end?”
But what are we to look for? We are to look for Him. If we can see Him in the midst of it, all of a sudden the circumstances change, and the whole perspective of everything changes in our lives.
At the end of Paul’s life, he testified that all deserted him, but the Lord stood with him. Praise God, sometimes there is no one around to help, but the Lord stands with us.
Those who deserted Paul had once been with him. You cannot desert someone you were never with. They left him, and they deserted not only him personally but his teaching. They put it aside and went their own way.
But Paul was more dependent upon the love of Christ than upon the love of the brethren. He was ultimately cast upon the love of Christ.
If we are dependent upon the love of the brethren, we will become offended and hurt, and we may quit the race. Now, if we have the love of Christ in us, we will love the brethren. Do not take what I am saying the wrong way. If we have the love of Christ, we will love the brethren.
But if we are dependent upon our brothers and sisters more than we are dependent upon Christ to make it through to the end, we will not make it. We must have the solid foundation of the love of Christ controlling and ruling in our hearts.
Regardless of how the brethren treat us, we must press on. We must continue through. That is love which is uninfluenced. That is the love of Christ.
The things that hurt us the most are often the things done by those closest to us. We are going to hurt one another at times. As assemblies, as we go through whatever may be ahead, we will offend, fail, and let one another down.
Praise God, we have the blood of the Lamb that cleanses us, and there are opportunities for restoration. But we cannot allow such hurts to become obstacles or stumbling blocks. The love of Christ must control our hearts in such a way that love for the brethren is manifested.
I desire this because I see that we so often allow one another to impact our relationship with the Lord. It is not right. It is not right the way we sometimes treat each other. But regardless of how we are treated, we have to press on and finish this race.
It is only the love of Christ that will keep us through this. Would the love of Christ be manifest in a fuller and greater way so that we can be the testimony He desires us to be in this hour?
Whatever is ahead of us, whatever situation comes, the love of Christ is all-sufficient in everything.
I was reading a sermon by C. H. Spurgeon. He was sharing on the love of Christ and telling how, after one of his sermons, he went to a farmer’s house for lunch. Now, those who know Spurgeon know that he loved to eat. Spurgeon was very rotund, and there were no weight watchers with him.
He went to this farmer’s house, where there is nothing better than a good home-cooked meal. Everything was fresh, and they brought all this food. He ate and ate until he was stuffed.
Then he went outside, walking around and patting his big old belly. He looked up at the top of the barn and saw a weather vane. Something was written on it, but he could not make it out. So he asked the farmer, “What is written on your weather vane?”
The farmer said, “God is love.”
Spurgeon, in his rather overwhelming way, looked down at this little brother and said, “Why would you put ‘God is love’ on a weather vane? That ought to be in your house on a pretty plaque. Why would you put it up there on a weather vane?”
The little farmer finally stood up and said, “Well, brother, I look up at that weather vane, and it tells me that whatever way the wind is blowing, God’s love is with me. If it is a cold north wind, the love of Christ is with me. If it is a hot southern wind, the love of Christ is with me.”
Brothers and sisters, as we go through this life, whatever way the wind blows, the love of Christ is with us, because He has loved us to the uttermost.
Why does He love us? He loves us because He loves us. As He told the people in Deuteronomy, He did not set His love upon them because they were great in number or greater than other peoples. They were actually the fewest. But He loved them because He loved them.
He loves us in such a way that He desires us no longer to live for ourselves, but to live for Him who died for us, that we might be His people in this hour.
As we consider the love of Christ, we pray that the Lord would encourage and strengthen us in this hour. As we become more conscious of His love, may we allow the character of that love to be developed within us and to control us.
May we be rooted and grounded in Him in a fuller and greater way, no matter what lies ahead. There is a rooting, grounding, and building process taking place as we are conformed to His image—not only individually, but also as we are brought together by His great love to be the testimony He desires in this hour.
May we be a people who not only love Him, but respond to His love. May we be prepared and hasten His return.
May the love of Christ never become too familiar to us. May we never look upon it as elementary. May it be fresh within each one of our hearts every day, that we may know His loving us to the uttermost.
Lord, when we even touch upon Your love, there is a vastness there that goes so far beyond us. We admit that we have only tasted of Your love in part.
But, Lord, that taste is so sweet to our mouths that it causes us to want to taste more and more of You.
Oh, Lord, we are thankful that You have made Your life and Your love available to us. We pray that we would be those found cooperating with You in this hour, cooperating in such a way that Your light would shine brighter and brighter.
May You have the testimony of Your very Self upon this earth in this day and time, in these last days. As many counterfeits are raised up, may there be a truth recovered upon the earth in this hour that testifies of Jesus Christ as King of kings and Lord of lords, as the One who first loved us.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.