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Music For the Soul
Devotional: October 6th

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THE BREADTH OF THE LOVE OF CHRIST

There the Lord will be with us in majesty, a place of broad rivers and streams. - Isaiah 33:21

The love of God in Christ Jesus is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so all creatures rest in the heaven of His love. Mankind has many common characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all aspire; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the same relation to the love, the Divine love, which lies in Jesus Christ. There are no step-children in His great family, and none of them receive a more grudging or less ample share of His love and goodness than every other. Broad as the race, and curtaining it over as some great tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ’s love is the breadth of humanity. And it is universal because it is Divine. No human heart can be stretched so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our human affection, and the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, all disappear before that love of Christ’s which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and clingingness of a human and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity of a Divine, heart.

And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is broad. Our human affections are too often like the estuary of some great stream which runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ’s love is deep, though it be wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread, five thousand men, women, and children, all seated at a table, "and they did all eat and were filled."

The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. It is not as it is with us, who give a part of our heart to this one and to that one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All this gift belongs to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every eye, and as every beholder sees the moon path across the dark waters, stretching from the place where he stands to the centre of light.

There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ, both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We have a right to say, "He loves all, therefore He loves me." And we have a right to say, " He loves me, therefore He loves all." For surely the love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul. What is the breadth of the love of Christ? It is broad as mankind, it is narrow as myself.

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