Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 9

I
must be quite sure that God loves me. My love can never be anything else than an answer
to His. It can only be secondary and derived, or I would rather say reflected and flashed
back from His. And so, very significantly, the Psalmist says, 'Those that love Thy Name,'
meaning by 'Name,' as is always meant by it, the revealed character of God. If I am to
love God, He must not hide in the darkness behind His infinity, but must come out and
give me something about Him that I know. The three letters G O D mean nothing, and
there is no power in them to stir a man's heart. It must be the knowledge of the acts of
God that brings men to love Him. And there is no way of getting that knowledge but
through the faith which, as I said, must precede love. For faith realises the fact that God
loves. 'We have known and believed the love that God hath to us.' The first step is to
grasp the great truth of the loving God, and through that truth to grasp the God that loves.
And then, and not till then, does there spring up in a man's heart love towards Him. But it
is only the faith that is set on Him who hath declared the Father unto us that gives us for
our very own the grasp of the facts, which facts are the only possible fuel that can kindle
love in a human heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us,' and we shall never know
that He loves us unless we come to the knowledge through the road of faith. So John
himself tells us when he says, in the words that I have already quoted, 'We have known
and believed.' He puts the foundation last, 'We have known,' because 'we have believed'
'the love that God hath to us.'
And so faith is the only possible means by which any of us can ever experience, as well
as realise, the love that kindles ours. It is the possession of the fact of redemption for my
very own and of the blessings which accompany it, and that alone, that binds a man to
God in the bonds of love that cannot be broken, and that subdues and unites all vagrant
emotions, affections, and desires in the mighty tide of a love that ever sets towards Him.
As surely as the silvery moon in the sky draws after it the heaped waters of the ocean all
round the world, so God's love draws ours. They that believe contemplate, and they that
believe experience the effects of that divine love, which must be experienced ere our

answering love can be flashed back to heaven.
Students of acoustics tell us that if you have two stringed instruments in adjacent
apartments, tuned to the same pitch, a note sounded on one of them will be feebly
vibrated upon the other as soon as the waves of sound have reached the sensitive string.
In like manner a man's heart gives off a faint, but musical, little tinkle of answering love
to God when the deep note of God's love to him, struck on the chords of heaven up
yonder, reaches his poor heart.
Love follows trust. So, brethren, if we desire to be warmed, let us get into the sunshine
and abide there. If we desire to have our hearts filled with love to God, do not let us
waste our time in trying to pump up artificial emotions or to persuade ourselves that we
love Him better than we do, but let us fix our thoughts and fasten our refuge-seeking trust
on Him, and then that shall kindle ours.
III. Lastly, righteousness follows trust and love.
The last description here of the man who begins as a believer and then advances to being
a lover is righteous. That is the evangelical order. That is the great blessing and beauty of
Christianity, that it goes an altogether different way to work to make men good from that
which any other system has ever dreamed of. It says, first of all, trust, and that will create
love and that will ensure obedience. Faith leads to righteousness because, in the very act
of trusting God, I come out of myself, and going out of myself and ceasing from all
self-admiration and self-dependence and self-centred life is the beginning of all good and
has in it the germ of all righteousness, even as to live for self is the mother tincture out of
which we can make all sins.
And faith leads to righteousness in another way. Open the heart and Christ comes in.
Trust Him and He fills our poor nature with 'the law of