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Music For the Soul
Devotional: October 8th

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THE HEIGHT AND DEPTH OF THE LOVE OF CHRIST

O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! - Romans 11:33

Depth and height are but two ways of expressing the same dimension; the one we begin at the top and measure down, the other we begin at the bottom and measure up. The top is the Throne; and the downward measure - how is it to be stated? In what terms of distance are we to express it? How far is it from the Throne of the Universe to the manger at Bethlehem and the Cross at Calvary and the sepulcher in the garden! That is the depth of the love of Christ. Howsoever far may be the distance from that loftiness of co-equal Divinity in the bosom of the Father, and radiant with glory, to the lowliness of the form of a servant, and the sorrows, limitations, rejections, pains, and final death - that is the measure of the depth of Christ’s love. As if some planet were to burst from its track and plunge downwards in amongst the mists and the narrowness of our earthly atmosphere, so we can estimate the depth of the love of Christ by saying, "He came from above, He tabernacled with us." The way to measure the depth is to begin at the Throne, and go down to the Cross and to the foul abysses of evil. The way to measure the height is to begin at the Cross and the foul abysses of evil, and to go up to the Throne. That is to say, the topmost thing in the Universe, the shining apex and summit, glittering away up there in the radiant unsetting light, is the love of God in Jesus Christ.

A well-known modern scientist has hazarded the speculation that the origin of life on this planet has been the falling upon it of the fragment of a meteor or an aerolite, from some other system, with a speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever may be the case in regard of the physical life, that is absolutely true in the case of spiritual life. It all comes because this Heaven descended Christ has come down the long staircase of Incarnation, and has brought with Him into the clouds and oppressions of our terrestrial atmosphere a germ of life which He has planted in the heart of the race, there to spread for ever. That is the measure of the depth of the love of Christ. And there is another way to measure it. My sins, my helpless miseries, are deep: but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin; that is deeper than all sorrow, deeper than all necessity; that shrinks from no degradation; that turns away from no squalor; that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. When a coal-pit gets blocked up by some explosion, no brave rescuing party will venture to descend into the lowest depths of the poisonous darkness until some ventilation has come there. But this loving Christ goes down, down, down into the thickest, most pestilential atmosphere, reeking with sin and corruption, and stretches out a rescuing hand to the most abject and undermost of all the victims. How deep is the love of Christ? The deep mines of sin and of alienation are all undermined and counter-mined by His love. Sin is an abyss, a mystery, how deep only they know who have fought against it; but

"O Love! thou bottomless abyss,

My sins are swallowed up in Thee."

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