Greatness of the Love of Christ.
It is an axiom of biblical truth—“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend;” and we have here and there a beautiful, though dim, legend of some heroic husband and wife who, for the love they bore to each other, did literally die for each other. There are, in the facts of profane history, a few dim, shadowy outlines, a few scanty, dishevelled notices of such occurrences as these—that when the oracle gave any individual the alternative of dying for another, some such individuals have counted it a sweet and sacred thing to die, and have died for their love of another—for their wife, for their husband. Such are the tales of profane history (and there are not half a dozen of them in the six thousand years of this world's history), such are the stories that have come down to us of the triumphs of human love, of the achievements of human affection. But there is not one recorded of a person dying for his enemy. We have instances of a person dying for his friend, an attached friend! No doubt David or Jonathan would have died, the one for the other. David would have died for Jonathan, or Jonathan would have died for David, if there had been occasion; such was the love they bore one to another. But the love of Christ was not for his friends, but for his adversaries; not for his lovers, but for his enemies. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us.”