The Love of God | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 19, 1865

The Love of God.

"Keep yourselves in the love of God" is an injunction probably never more warranted in the history of the Christian church than at the present day. The greatest danger to which we as Christians are exposed, is that of declining in our love to God. Some of us know, by bitter experience, that the world not only gives us no assistance in walking the "narrow path," but actually proves a powerful hindrance. Love to God is not born of earth. Every Christian can well remember a time when there was no beauty nor loveliness in the character of Christ that he should desire it, and, though redemption had sounded in his ears again and again, it had failed to awaken his love or excite his gratitude.

A plant, transferred to an unfriendly soil, and to a climate less congenial than that of Heaven,—love to God—needs to be guarded with the utmost vigilance, lest the roots of bitterness spring up in our hearts and choke it. We are not only surrounded by objects calculated to draw out our warmest affections, setting themselves up as rivals to God, but the very tendency of our nature is to depart from Him. The truth—though a humiliating one—is, that we love sin without an effort, and ere we are aware of it, are "rolling it as a sweet morsel under our tongues." The physical is often leading the moral nature into forbidden paths, by seeking to make it believe that those objects alone are worthy our love and worship which we can see and feel.—Hence the necessity for a continued warfare against the influence without, lest our love to God gradually decline until it ceases to exercise any power over our lives.

In the early stages of Christian experience, love is warm and ardent. When for the first time the grace of God enters the recreated soul, and life and immortality are brought to light, God becomes all in all—the soul and center of the believer's world, and Jesus the "chiefest among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely." The very depths of the soul are stirred up, and grateful thanks spring from the lips—"I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplication—because he hath inclined his ear unto me—therefore I will call upon him as long as I live." "Bless the Lord, O my soul! and forget not all his benefits!" At this time, we cannot think it possible that we shall ever forget or love him less who has done so much for us; but when years have passed over us with their accumulated cares and temptations—when our dearest earthly hopes lie trampled in the dust—happy indeed shall we be if they have left no blight upon our hearts, nor lessened our love for God.

Experience has doubtless taught many of us that, in declining from our "first love," we are not immediately sensible of it. Our friends often observe the change sooner than we, and should they neglect to admonish us of our wanderings, we are oblivious to the fact until we find ourselves cherishing some known sin—taking pleasure in what God has forbidden, or in entering into some of the most spiritual exercises of religion with assumed zeal and formality. It is not wonderful that Joshua, when for the last time he addressed the assembled people of Israel, should most solemnly enjoin upon them to "take good heed therefore unto themselves that they love the Lord their God." Though it is the philosophy of some that our first love will of necessity lose some of its fervor; yet such an inference is not deducible either from the Bible or the experience of true Christians. If we follow on to know the Lord, as the beauty and perfection of his character become better known to us, we shall find our hearts more and still more firmly attached to him, until "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor hight, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus."

Let us then cherish this love, lying as it does at the very foundation of not only our happiness here, but of that hereafter. Let obstacles only draw us near to the Great Head of the church, and we shall welcome everything which shall increase our affection for Him and draw us so completely within the fold of the Good Shepherd that we shall never more desire to wander. —Sel.