Spirit Jesus

“We love Him because He first loved us” – 1John iv.19

This is a great doctrinal truth, and I might with much propriety preach a doctrinal sermon from it, of which the sum and substance would be the sovereign grace of God. God’s love is evidently prior to ours: “He first loved us.” It is also clear enough from the text that God’s love is the cause of ours, for “We love Him because He first loved us.” Therefore, going back to old time, or rather before all time, when we find God loving us with an everlasting love, we gather that the reason of His choice is not because we loved Him, but because He willed to love us.

His reasons, and he had reasons (for we read of “the counsel of His will”) are known to Himself, but they are not to be found in any inherent goodness in us, or which was foreseen to be in us. We were chosen simply because He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. He loved us because He would love us.

The gift of His dear Son, which was a close consequent upon His choice of His people, was too great a sacrifice on God’s part to have been drawn from Him by any goodness in the creature. It was not possible for the highest piety to have deserved so vast a boon as the gift of the Only-Begotten; it was not possible for anything in man to have merited the Incarnation and the passion of the Redeemer.

Our redemption, like our election, springs from the spontaneous, self-originating love of God. And our regeneration, in which we are made actual partakers of the divine blessings in Jesus Christ, was not of us, nor by us. We were not converted because we were already inclined that way, neither were we regenerated because some good thing was in us by nature; but we owe our new birth entirely to His potent love, which dealt with us effectually, turning us from death to life, from darkness to light, and from the alienation of our mind and the enmity of our spirit into that delightful path of love, in which we are now travelling to the skies.

As believers on Christ’s Name, we “were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” The sum and substance of the text is, that God’s uncaused love, springing up within Himself, has been the sole means of bringing us into the condition of loving Him. Our love to Him is like a tricklng rill, speeding its way to the ocean because it first came from the ocean. All the rivers run into the sea, but their floods first arose from it; the clouds that were exhaled from the Mighty main distilled in showers and filled the water-brooks.

Here was the first cause and prime origin; and, as if they recognized the obligation, they pay tribute in return to the parent source. The ocean love of God, so broad that even the wing of imagination could not traverse it, sends forth its treasures of the rain of grace, which drops upon our hearts, which are as the pastures of the wilderness; they make our hearts to overflow, and in streams fo gratitude the life imparted flows back again to God.

All good things are of thee, Great God; Thy goodness creates our good; Thine infinite love to us draws forth our love to Thee.

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