p. 312 | LAW AND LOVE by H. F. Phelps

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 19, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 20.

LAW AND LOVE.

By H. F. Phelps

[The following, with the above title, is from the American Messenger, published by the American Tract Society, dated New York, November, 1893. We commend it to the reader for its logic and truth. H. F. PHELPS.]

THE son who should say, “I do not obey my father because I love him so much,” would be thought a poor type of filial piety. If he explained by saying, “My father does not desire my obedience; he prefers my love,” it would be held that he had a very low apprehension of his father’s character. If he added, “My father respects my liberty so much that he has preferred to absolve me from obedience, taking my love as an equivalent for it,” it would very properly be concluded that he was ignorant of the true meaning both of liberty and love.

Yet this is very much the way that many Christians feel, if we may judge of them either by their words or by their conduct. They misconstrue both Christian liberty and Christian love. Because the first and great commandment is to love God with all the powers, they think themselves absolved from obedience to the other commandments. “Love is the fulfilling of the law,” they say, meaning that love is the dispensing with the law. The liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free is, they think, a condition in which they are no longer subject to his law.

Yet they do not find this theory borne out by the analogy of human law. It is the man who obeys the law of the land who is at liberty, not he who breaks it and is imprisoned. The man who lives at peace with his neighbor is under no bondage to the law against murder, nor the honest man to the law against theft. Such men as these desire the existence and enforcement of those laws; they are the very charter of their freedom.

So it was with the Psalmist, who sang, “I will walk at liberty, for I seek thy precepts.” Not he who has no law to keep, but he who loves to keep the law, is the free man. “I delight to do thy will, O my God,” is the spirit of the man who truly loves God. Liberty is liberty to do right; love delights in obedience.

There is no antagonism between election and free will to those who “elect unto good works,” “called to be saints,” desire with their whole hearts to be saintly and to do good works. So the son who truly loves his father has no desire to be absolved from his obedience. He feels himself most free when with truest love he walks in the way of his commandments.