Do you believe, as a poor guilty sinner, on the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you believe that God, out of His own boundless love, gave Jesus His Son? Cast away the vain hope of any good thing of your own fit for God; receive on God’s authority, and in His grace, Him Who has all good, not only for God, but for you, and Who was sent to be the propitiation for sins. Then, as receiving God’s glad tidings, you are entitled to say, “By grace I do believe that I have life, and peace, and am His child.”
While you are uncertain of God’s love, you cannot really love Him; when you believe the reality of His love in giving His Son for the ungodly, for His enemies, is He not coming down to meet you? Take again the once abandoned woman (Luke 7), and the violent robber on the cross (Luke 23); why are these extreme cases recorded, but to encourage you on God’s part? Otherwise they had been passed over in silence. But they are written expressly to meet doubting men and women, as hard to believe God’s love as the most outrageous sinner, or even more so.
Do not be discouraged because you come to the conclusion that you do not love God. This is not the true question; but does not God point to Christ and His death for sins as the best proof even He could give of His love to you and me? When you bow your reasoning mind to such an overwhelming proof to satisfy you of His love, you will surely love, though you may be slow to allow it: others will see the change in you. When you rest on Christ’s sacrifice for your sins, your heart will open to the God that thus cleanses you by Christ’s blood from every stain; and you will be ready then to say, “I have found Him,” and soon learn that it was He who found you.
Come just as you are, that He may have all the glory. And if He loved me with so mighty a love of His own, without one single thing or thought in me worthy of His love; if He so loved me notwithstanding my entire being, and all my life, full of sins, will He cease to love me when I am His child, His son by faith in Christ, and by the Holy Spirit, cry Abba Father? Assuredly not!
W.K.