Love for Christ by George B. Gow

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 25, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 25.

Love for Christ.

By George B. Gow

THE disciple must love as well as believe. Christ and his kingdom are real to Satan and his demons, so real as to occupy their thoughts and make them fools with confusion and madness. Men sometimes discover toward the end of life that there is no good for them but God, and yet, through the habit of a life-long selfishness, they continue to hate the good and call it evil. It is possible for a man who is enrolled among the disciples of Christ to be very much tortured in spirit by a keen sense of the reality of the things of the kingdom of Christ, and yet be held fast by the habit of avarice or fleshly lust. It is only when love brings a man into hearty, happy submission to the will of God that faith becomes an inspiration.

The new-born child of God will naturally and properly be filled, for a time, with the joy of his own salvation. He needs to measure as well as he can how great a thing it is that God has come to him, bringing redemption from eternal death, and glorious life through his own abiding presence. That fact is to be to him forever a fountain of ever-flowing gratitude and zeal. But as a fact it has two sides, his side and Christ's side. It is he that is saved. Yes! Let him shout for joy that he has escaped from sin and hell. But it is Christ that has saved him, died for him, regenerated him, come to be his new self as well as his captain and his king. And if he is to be a follower of this captain, a servant of this king, a fruit-bearer whose fruit shall abide, he must very soon lose sight almost wholly of the self-side of this fact of his redemption in the adoring contemplation of the Christ-side of it. A church needs to be composed of disciples who have well-nigh ceased from the contemplation of the advantages to themselves of their relationship to Christ, so completely is their gratitude for personal salvation swallowed up in their admiration and passionate love for the Being whose holiness reaches its supreme perfection in bearing the sins of the guilty world, and whose wisdom attains its crowning glory in the transformation of a lost soul into a holy child of God. Gratitude can never be wanting in the believer's love. It will grow stronger rather than weaker. But his love, like his Master's for a lost world, must rise far above the thought of self, and burn pure and strong for his ineffably glorious Lord, the King eternal,—the God who is man, and who in his perfect manhood shows the world what its Creator and Redeemer is.

Such love is a sweet and blessed passion that sanctifies and glorifies, an energy that taxes all the power of the soul to endure its activity, a creative, life-giving energy, cross-bearing, sacrificial, converting the soul into the likeness of the divine nature. It is such transforming love as this that qualifies a disciple or a church to bear abiding fruit. A little of it will doubtless bear a little fruit, but the fruit-bearing church whose fruit is to be both abundant and abiding must abound in it.—Geo. B. Gow, in Watchman.