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Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 7th

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KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE

If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, . . . but have not love, I am nothing. - 1 Corinthians 13:2

MAN may know all about Christ and His love without one spark of love in his heart. There are thousands of people who, as far as their heads are concerned, know quite as much of Jesus Christ and His love as any of us do, and could talk about it and argue about it, and draw inferences from it, and have got the whole system of evangelical Christianity at their fingers’ ends. Ay! It is at their fingers’ ends; it never gets any nearer them than that.

There is a knowledge with which love has nothing to do, and it is a knowledge that with many people is all-sufficient. "Knowledge puffeth up," says the Apostle, into an unwholesome bubble of self-complacency that will one day be pricked and disappear - nothing; but "charity, love, buildeth up "a steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge: the mere rattle of notions in a man’s dry brain, like the seeds of a withered poppy-head - very many, very dry, very hard - that will make a noise when you shake it; and there is another kind of knowledge, which goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling by the name, and that knowledge is the child of love. Love, says Paul, is the parent of all knowledge. We know, really know, any emotions of any sort whatever only by experience. You may talk for ever about feelings, and you teach nothing about them to those who have not experienced them. The poets of the world have been singing about love ever since the world began. But no heart has learned what love is from even the sweetest and deepest songs. Who that is not a father can be taught paternal love by words, or can come to a perception of it by an effort of mind? And so with all other emotions. Only the lips that have drunk the cup of sweetness or of bitterness can tell how sweet or how bitter it is; and even when they, made wise by experience, speak out their deepest hearts, the listeners are but little the wiser unless they too have been initiated in the same school. Experience is our only teacher in matters of feeling and emotion, as in the lower regions of taste and appetite. A man must be hungry to know what hunger is; he must taste honey or wormwood in order to know the taste of honey or wormwood; and in like manner he cannot know sorrow but by feeling its ache, and must love if he would know love. Experience is our only teacher, and her school-fees are heavy. Just as a blind man can never be made to understand the glories of sunrise or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may read books about acoustics, but they will not give him a notion of what it is to hear Beethoven; - so we must have love to Christ before we know what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experience the love of Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is; and we must have love to Christ in order to have a deep and living possession of the love of Christ, though reciprocally it is also true that we must have the love of Christ known and felt by our answering hearts, if we are ever to love Him back again.

"He must be loved, ere that to you

He will seem worthy of your love."

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