LOVE is its own motive, and needs no exhortation. Love would not be love if it required stimulating; like the ceaseless fountain rising up from the depths of the earth, and unaffected by the circumstances of wet or drought, love ever flows out from its own bosom. A true mother needs no exhortation to love her child, for it is her nature to do so. We might as well ask the sea waves to roll on in their fullness, or the swallows to migrate in their season, as ask love to be constant to itself.
God is love, and His children are the objects of His love. Even the very hairs of our heads are all numbered. There is no sigh nor cry from the soul of the least child in His family unheard and unheeded by Him. And though in the discipline of this school of life we are often inclined to regard as severe the sorrows portioned out to us, yet our Father knows the needs be for them all. Do not we, as earthly parents, in pure love to our children, often check and even punish them, so that they may abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good? And the hand that chastises or the word of severity causes deeper grief to the heart of the parent than to that of the child.
No bare exhortation will ever make us love God, we indeed need stimulation to do so, but the stimulation will be the partaking afresh of His love to us who is the fountain of love. The nature of God is love, and we are partakers of the divine nature. “Love is of God: He that loveth is born of God.”