Abide
in Christ by Andrew Murray
Day
22
And
In His Love
As
the Father loved me, I also have loved you: abide in my love.—John
15:9
Blessed
Lord, enlighten our eyes to see aright the glory of this wonderful
word. Open to our meditation the secret chamber of Your Love, that
our souls may enter in, and find their everlasting dwelling place.
How else will we know anything of a love that passes knowledge?
Before
the Savior speaks the word that invites us to abide in His love, He
first tells us what that love is. What He says of it must give force
to His invitation, and make the thought of not accepting it an
impossibility: "As the Father loved me, I also have loved you!"
"As
the Father has loved me..." How will we be able to form right
conceptions of this love? Lord, teach us. God is love. Love is His
very being. Love is not an attribute, but the very essence of His
nature, the center around which all His glorious attributes gather.
It was because He was love that He was the Father, and that there was
a Son. Love needs an object to whom it can give itself away, in whom
it can lose itself, with whom it can make itself one. Because God is
love, there must be a Father and a Son. The love of the Father to the
Son is that Divine passion with which He delights in the Son, and
speaks, "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The
Divine love is as a burning fire; in all its intensity and infinity
it has only one object and only one joy, and that is the only
begotten Son. When we gather together all the attributes of God —
His infinity, His perfection, His immensity, His majesty, His
omnipotence — and consider them just as the rays of the glory of
His love, we still fail in forming any conception of what that love
must be. It is a love that passes knowledge.
And
yet this love of God to His Son must serve, O my soul, as the mirror
in which you are to learn how Jesus loves you. As one of His redeemed
ones, you are His delight, and all His desire is to you, with the
longing of a love which is stronger than death, and which many waters
cannot quench. His heart yearns after you, seeking your fellowship
and your love. He would die again to possess you if it were needed.
As the Father loved the Son, and could not live without Him, could
not be God the blessed without Him —so Jesus loves you. His life is
bound up in yours. You are to Him inexpressibly more indispensable
and precious than you can ever know. You are one with Himself. "As
the Father loved me, so I have loved you." What a love!
It
is an eternal love. From before the foundation of the world — God's
Word teaches us this — the purpose had been formed that Christ
should be the Head of His Church, that He should have a body in which
His glory could be set forth. In that eternity He loved and longed
for those who had been given Him by the Father; and when He came and
told His disciples that He loved them, it was indeed not with a love
of earth and of time, but with the love of eternity. And it is with
that same infinite love that His eye still rests upon each of us here
seeking to abide in Him, and in each breathing of that love there is
indeed the power of eternity. "I have loved you with an
everlasting love.” (Jer. 31:3).
It
is a perfect love. It gives all, and holds nothing back. "The
Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand” (John
3:35). And in the same way, Jesus loves His own. All He has is
theirs. When it was needed, He sacrificed His throne and crown for
you. He did not count His own life and blood too dear to give for
you. His righteousness, His Spirit, and His glory all are yours. This
love holds nothing...nothing back, but, in a manner which no human
mind can fathom, makes you one with itself. O wondrous love! To love
us even as the Father loved Him, and to offer us this love as our
everyday dwelling.
It
is a gentle and most tender love. As we think of the love of the
Father to the Son, we see in the Son everything so infinitely worthy
of that love. When we think of Christ's love to us, there is nothing
but sin and unworthiness to meet the eye. And the question comes, How
can that love within the bosom of the Divine life and its perfections
be compared to the love that rests upon sinners? Can it indeed be the
same love? Blessed be God, we know that it is. The nature of love is
always one, however different the objects. Christ knows of no other
law of love but that with which His Father loved Him. Our
wretchedness only serves to call out more distinctly the beauty of
love, such as could not be seen even in Heaven. With the tenderest
compassion He bows to our weakness, with patience inconceivable He
bears with our slowness, with the gentlest lovingkindness He meets
our fears and our follies. It is the love of the Father to the Son,
beautiful, glorified, in its condescension, in its exquisite
adaptation to our needs.
And
it is an unchangeable love. "Having loved His own who were in
the world, He loved them to the end” (John 13:1). “For the
mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness
shall not depart from you” (Isa. 54:10). The promise with which it
begins its work in the soul is this: "I will not leave you until
I have done what I have spoken to you” (Gen. 28:15). And just as
our wretchedness was what first drew that love to us, so the sin,
with which it is so often grieved, and which may well cause us to
fear and doubt, is only a new motive for it to hold to us all the
more. And why? We can give no reason but this: "As the Father
has loved me, so I have loved you."
And
now, does not this love suggest the motive, the measure, and the
means of that surrender by which we yield ourselves wholly to abide
in Him.
This
love surely supplies a motive. Only look and see how this love stands
and pleads and prays. Gaze, O gaze on the Divine form, the eternal
glory, the heavenly beauty, the tender pleading gentleness of the
crucified love, as it stretches out its pierced hands and says, "Oh,
will you not abide with me? Will you not come and abide in me?"
It points you up to the eternity of love from where it came to seek
you. It points you to the Cross, and all it has borne to prove the
reality of its affection, and to win you for itself. It reminds you
of all it has promised to do for you, if you will only throw yourself
unreservedly into its arms. This love of God asks you whether, so far
as you have come to dwell with it and taste its blessedness, it has
not done well by you. And with a Divine authority, mingled with such
an inexpressible tenderness that one might almost think he heard the
tone of reproach in it, it says, "Soul, as the Father has loved
me, so I have loved you: abide in my love." Surely there can be
only one answer to such pleading: Lord Jesus Christ! here I am. From
now on, your love will be the only home of my soul: in Your love
alone will I abide.
That
love is not only the motive, but also the measure, of our surrender
to abide in it. Love gives all, but asks all. It does so, not because
it grudges us anything, but because without this it cannot get
possession of us to fill us with itself. In the love of the Father
and the Son, it was so. In the love of Jesus to us, it was so. In our
entering into His love to abide there, it must be so too. Our
surrender to it must have no other measure than its surrender to us.
Oh, that we understood how the love that calls us has infinite riches
and fullness of joy for us, and that what we give up for its sake
will be rewarded a hundredfold in this life! Or rather, if we
understood that it is a Love with a height and a depth and a length
and a breadth that passes knowledge! How all thought of sacrifice or
surrender would pass away, and our souls would be filled with wonder
at the unspeakable privilege of being loved with such a love, of
being allowed to come and abide in it forever!
And
if doubt again suggest the question: “But is it possible, can I
always abide in His love?”, then listen how that love itself
supplies the only means for the abiding in Him. It is faith in that
love which will enable us to abide in it. If this love is indeed so
Divine, such an intense and burning passion, then surely I can depend
on it to keep me and to hold me fast. Then surely all my unworthiness
and feebleness can be no hindrance. If this love is indeed so Divine,
with infinite power at its command, I surely have a right to trust
that it is stronger than my weakness...and that with its almighty arm
it will clasp me to its bosom, and suffer me to go out no more. I see
how this is the one thing my God requires of me. Treating me as a
reasonable being, endowed with the wondrous power of willing and
choosing, He cannot force all this blessedness on me, but waits till
I give the willing consent of the heart. In His great kindness, He
has ordered the token of His consent to be faith — that faith by
which utter sinfulness casts itself into the arms of love to be saved
and utter weakness to be kept and made strong. O Infinite Love! Love
with which the Father loved the Son! Love with which the Son loves
us! I can trust You. I do trust You. O keep me abiding in You.
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