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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 24th

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THE TRUE OBJECT OF LOVE

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. - 1 John 4:8

We are made with hearts that need to rest upon an absolute love; we are made with understandings that need to grasp a pure, a perfect, and, as I believe, paradoxical though it may sound, a personal Truth. We are made with wills that crave for an absolute authoritative command, and we are made with a moral nature that needs a perfect holiness. And we need all that love, truth, authority, purity to be gathered into one; for the misery of the world is that when we set out to look for treasures, we have to go into many lands and to many merchants to buy many goodly pearls. But we need One of great price, in which all our wealth may be invested. We need that One to be an undying and perpetual possession. There is One to whom our love can ever cleave, and fear none of the sorrows or imperfections that make earthward-turned love a rose with many a thorn, One for whom it is a pure gain to lose ourselves, One who is plainly the only worthy recipient of the whole love and self-surrender of the heart. And that One is God, revealed and brought near to us in Jesus Christ. In that great Saviour we have a love at once divine and human; we have the great transcendent instance of love leading to sacrifice. On that love and sacrifice for us Christ builds His claim on us for our hearts, and our all. Life alone can communicate life; it is only light that can diffuse light; it is only love that can kindle love; it is only sacrifice that can inspire sacrifice. And so He comes to us, and asks that we should just love Him back again as He has loved us. He first gives Himself utterly unto us, and then asks us to give ourselves wholly to Him. He first yields up His own life, and then He says, " He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." The object, the true object, for all this depth of love which lies slumbering in our hearts, is God in Christ, the Christ that died for us.

God’s love is Christ’s love; Christ’s love is God’s love. And this is the lesson that we gather - that that infinite and Divine loving-kindness does not turn away from thee, my brother and my friend, because thou art a sinner, but remains hovering about thee, with wooing invitations and with gentle touches, if it may draw thee to repentance, and open a fountain of answering affection in thy seared and dry heart. The love of God is deeper than all our sins. " For His great love wherewith He loved us, when we were dead in sins. He quickened us." Sin is but the cloud behind which the everlasting Sun lies in all its power and warmth, unaffected by the cloud; and the light will yet strike, the light of His love will yet pierce through, with its merciful shafts bringing healing in their beams, and dispersing all the pitchy darkness of man’s transgression. And as the mists gather themselves up and roll away, dissipated by the heat of that sun in the upper sky, and reveal the fair earth below, so the love of Christ shines in, melting the mist and dissipating the fog, thinning it off in its thickest places, and at last piercing its way through it, down to the heart of the man that has been lying beneath the oppression of this thick darkness, and who thought that the fog was the sky, and that there was no sun there above.

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