The Love of God
A.W. Tozer
Our Father which art in heaven, we Thy children are often troubled in mind, hearing within us at once the affirmations of faith and the accusations of conscience. We are sure that there is in us nothing that could attract the love of One as holy and as just as Thou art. Yet Thou hast declared Thine unchanging love for us in Christ Jesus. If nothing in us can win Thy love, nothing in the universe can prevent Thee from loving us. Thy love is uncaused and undeserved. Thou art Thyself the reason for the love wherewith we are loved. Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear; and our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared Thyself to be.
God does not love us the way we are. God has loved only one person the way He was and is; Christ Jesus. God loves us despite the way we are. (Romans 5:8)
1 Kings 8:23
O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to your servants who walk before you with all their heart…
Psalm 86:5
You, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.
John 15:9
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
1 John 4:10, 16b, 19
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. We love because he first loved us.
Octavius Winslow Daily Walking With God
All love to God in the soul is the result of His love to us; it is begotten in the heart by His Spirit: He took the first step, and made the first advance—"He first loved us." The love of God to us when yet we were sinners, who can unfold it? Before we had any being, and when we were enemies, He sent His Son to die for us; and when we were far off by wicked works He sent His Spirit to bring us to Him in the cloudy and dark day. All His dealings with us since then—His patience, restoring mercies, tender, loving, faithful care, yes, the very strokes of His rod—have but unfolded the depths of His love towards His people.
Romans 5:5b
God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
Ephesians 3:17b-19
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
John Owen Works, Volume 9, Sermons, Discourse XX on Ephesians 3:19
We may know experimentally that which we cannot know comprehensively; we may know that in its power and effect, which we cannot comprehend in its nature and depths.
2 Thessalonians 2:13
YOU, loved by God, from the beginning (before time began), were chosen to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.
Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.txt
We may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.
John Owen Communion with God
https://books.google.com/books?id=yTtM0YSqOQsC
Let, then, the saints' first notion of the Father be full of (His) eternal, free love towards them; let their hearts and thoughts be filled with breaking through all discouragements... There might be rest with delight and complacency to eternity.
The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.
In Christ the very nature of God is seen to be one of love and kindness and that he wills to show this love and kindness to sinners. In Christ, God has promised, sworn and solemnly committed himself to covenant to show this love and kindness to sinners.
Richard Sibbes The Soul’s Conflict With Itself
God saith to the soul, “I am thy salvation”; and the soul saith again, “Thou art my God”. Faith is nothing else but a spiritual echo, returning that voice back again, which God first speaks to the soul. For what acquaintance could the soul claim with so glorious a Majesty, if he should not first condescend so low as to speak peace and whisper secretly to the soul, that he is our loving God and Father, and we his peculiar ones in Christ; that our sins are all pardoned, his justice fully satisfied, and our persons freely accepted in his dear Son?
Thomas Adams (The Shakespeare of the Puritans)
By faith Christ is made ours; by love we are made His.
Matthew Mead A Name in Heaven adapted in Voices From The Past - Puritan Devotional Readings
Love is the most comfortable attribute in God, and the best name by which we know him (1 John 4:16). Love acts with a priority to all other attributes. Wisdom plans the happiness for man, and power and providence bring it to pass, but love has the first hand in the work. It was love that first summoned the great counsel held by all three persons in Elohim before an or angels existed. Love marked the Son as the foundation of the whole structure of man's salvation and blessedness. Love sent Christ into the world, put him to death, and made him an offering for sin. All the attributes of God act in the strength of love, and all the providences of God flow from the motions of love.
Jonathan Edwards The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners on 1 John 4:10 “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
You had no love to God; but yet he has exercised unspeakable love to you. You have condemned God, and set light by him; but so great a value has God’s grace set on you and your happiness, that you have been redeemed at the price of the blood of his own Son. You chose to be with Satan in his service; but yet God has made you a joint-heir with Christ of his glory. You were ungrateful for past mercies; but yet God not only continued those mercies, but bestowed unspeakably greater mercies upon you. You refused to hear when God called; but yet he has manifested his infinite mercy in the exercise of it towards you. You have rejected Christ, and set him at nothing; and yet he has become your Savior. You have destroyed yourself, but yet in God has been your help.
God has magnified his free grace towards you, and not to others because he has chosen you, and it has pleased him to set his love upon you. O what cause is here for praise! What obligations are upon you to bless the Lord, who hath dealt bountifully with you, and to magnify his holy name! What cause for you to praise him in humility, to walk humbly before God, and to be conformed to his image!
Horatius Bonar God's Way of Holiness
The gospel is the proclamation of free love; the revelation of the boundless charity of God. Nothing less than this will suit our world; nothing else is so likely to touch the heart, to go down to the lowest depths of depraved humanity, as the assurance that the sinner has been loved - loved by God, loved with a righteous love, loved with a free love that makes no bargain as to merit, or fitness, or goodness. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us!" (1 John 4:10).
Terror accomplishes no real obedience.
Suspense brings forth no fruit unto holiness.
No gloomy uncertainty as to God's favor can subdue one lust,
Or correct our crookedness of will.
But the free pardon of the cross uproots sin,
and withers all its branches.
Only the certainty of love,
forgiving love,
can do this.
G. Campbell Morgan
The Crises of the Christ, "Man Ignorant of God"
To know God is to know love, and to know the love of God, is to love. (1 John 4:19)
"Amazing Love" on Romans 5:8 "But God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
F.B. Meyer Our Daily Walk
On 2 Thessalonians 3:5a (RV) "And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God…”
Every time we dare to affirm that, notwithstanding appearances, God is Love; every time that we evince that love to others, even though our own heart is breaking; every time we say No to self and Yes to God, we make further progress into His Love. Dare to believe in the love of God, even when the darkness seems to veil it. Dare to believe that it is over all, and through all, and in all.
July 11, “Seeking Lost Souls”
The lost coin bears the image and superscription of the sovereign, once clear-cut by the mint, but it lies unused, tarnished and perhaps defaced, amidst the dust of the corner, or the chink of the floor. Its owner sweeps, ransacks, and explores every possible hiding-place until it is found. How aptly that lost coin represents the soul of man, made in the image of God, lying amid the dust of sin. The one hope for the sinner is the heart of God, who leaves no stone unturned that He may win us back.
October 1, "The Dimensions of God’s Love" on Ephesians 3:17-19
The dimensions of the Love of Christ! It is broad as humanity, "for God so loved the world" (John 3:16, 1 John 3:16); the length God's love had no date of origin (Ephesians 1:4), and shall have none of conclusion (Psalm 136:26). God is Love (1 John 4:8, 16), it continues ever, indissoluble, unchangeable, a perpetual present tense (Jeremiah 31:3). Its height - as the Flood out-topped the highest mountains, so that Love covers our highest sins (Romans 5:20). It is as high as the heaven above the earth (Psalm 103:11). Its depth - Christ our Lord descended into the lowest before He rose to the highest. He has touched the bottomless pit of our sin and misery, sorrow and need. However low your fall, or lowly your lot, the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27) of His love are always underneath.
A.B. Simpson
Our security depends not upon our love but on the unchanging love of God in Christ Jesus toward us. It is not the clinging arms of the baby that keep it from falling, but the strong arms of the loving mother. God loves us with an everlasting love, and although all else may change He will never leave us, never forsake us.
A.W. Tozer
The Pursuit of God
Our Father is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is! This is the best of good news: God loves us for ourselves. He values our love more than He values galaxies of newly created worlds.
The Next Chapter After the Last
God's love falls upon everything and everyone as the sun's rays light upon all the ten thousand objects on the face of the earth. The sun...shines on, whether it is shining upon a beautiful forest or a rubbish heap. The object upon which it shines has nothing to do with its shining. It shines because it is the sun.
Christ did not die for us that God might love us; He died for us because God already loved us from everlasting. Love is not the result of redemption; it is the cause of it.
Jesus, Our Man in Glory on Romans 8:31 "If God is for us, who can be against us?"
People conceive Christ to be a loving Jesus on our side while an angry Father God is against us. Never, never has there been any truth in that notion. Christ, being God, is for us. The Father, being God, is for us. The Holy Spirit, being God, is for us! That is why the Son came to die for us. That is why the risen Son, our great High Priest, is at the right hand of the Majesty on high, praying for us.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
The Plight of Man and the Power of God
It is only in the light of God's hatred and abhorrence of sin that we can really see His love, and appreciate the wonder and glory of the gospel. The measure of His anger against sin is the measure of the love that is prepared to forgive the sinner and to love him in spite of the sin.
The love of God expresses itself not by condoning sin or compromising with it; it deals with it, and yet does so in such a way that the sinner is not destroyed with his sin, but is delivered from it and its consequences...that is why the gospel is good news.
The Wrath of God
John 3:36 “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”
http://articles.ochristian.com/article540.shtml
Unless we start with this idea of the wrath of God against sin we cannot possibly understand the compassion of God, we cannot understand the love of God. It is only as I realise God's wrath against sin that I realise the full significance of His providing a way of salvation from it. If I do not understand this I do not understand that, and my talk about the love of God is mere loose sentimentality which is indeed a denial of the great biblical doctrine of the love of God.
Though we were dead in trespasses and sins, hateful and hating one another, polluted by sin, sinful in practice, living in trespasses and sins and under the wrath of God, and absolutely helpless and hopeless, the very God against whom we have sinned, the very God whom we have offended, has Himself provided the way of deliverance for us. He does so in the Person of His own dearly beloved Son, whom He did not spare even from the suffering and the agony and the shame of Calvary and that cruel death. He has offered us, and provides for us, the way of complete deliverance and reconciliation to Himself in spite of the fact that our sin in Adam and our own sins, and our own sinful state deserve nothing but His eternal wrath. That is the love of God! That is the “love so amazing, so divine”! God has done that for us, who deserve nothing but eternal wrath, which we could never have done for ourselves.
"Breadth, Length, Depth, Height"
http://articles.ochristian.com/article528.shtml
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ 10 tests for knowing that you know God’s love
From Life in Christ: Studies in 1 John on 1 John 4:16
(Listed in reverse order)
10. A loss of the feeling that God is against you.
9. A loss of a fear of God, while a sense of awe remains.
8. A sense that God is for you and that God loves you.
7. A sense of sins forgiven.
6. A sense of gratitude and thanksgiving to God.
5. An increasing hatred of sin.
4. A desire to please God and to live a godly life because of what He has done for you.
3. A desire to know Him better and to draw closer to Him.
2. A conscious regret that our love for Him is so poor combined with a desire to love Him more.
1. A delight in hearing these things and in hearing about Him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer My Soul Finds Rest: Reflections on the Psalms
We should never forget that every word of Holy Scripture [is] a quite personal message of God’s love for us.
Soren Kierkegaard The Prayers of Kierkegaard
You have loved us first, O God, alas! When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward You - You are first. If I rise at dawn and at the same second turn my soul toward You in prayer, You are there ahead of me. When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul toward You, You are the first and forever.
"Haddamut", written in Aramaic in 1050 by Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, a cantor in Worms, Germany
Could we with ink the ocean fill
and were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
and every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
would drain the ocean dry,
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
though stretched from sky to sky.
"How Deep The Father's Love For Us" by Stuart Townend, by Selah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKDujmtyAVk
Fernando Ortega
How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory
Behold the man upon a cross
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished
I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death…
I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection
Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.
CAUTION
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, "The Love of God"
The Apostle John, by the Spirit, wrote, "God is love," (1 John 4:16) and some have taken his words to be a definitive statement concerning the essential nature of God. This is a great error. John was by those words stating a fact, but he was not offering a definition. Equating love with God is a major mistake that has produced much unsound religious philosophy and has brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely out of accord with the Holy Scriptures and altogether of another climate from that of historic Christianity. Had the apostle declared that love is what God is, we would be forced to infer that God is what love is. If literally God is love, then literally love is God, and we are in all duty bound to worship love as the only God there is. If love is equal to God then God is only equal to love, and God and love are identical. Thus we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all His attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God. The God we have left is not the God of Israel; He is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; He is not the God of the prophets and the apostles; He is not the God of the saints and reformers and martyrs, nor yet the God of the theologians and hymnists of the church.
From God's other known attributes we may learn much about His love. We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning; because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has no limit; because He is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.