Christ's Love
John Flavel "Sacramental Meditations" on Ephesians 3:19
"...may you grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ..."
Labour to get the clearest and fullest knowledge of Christ and his love that is attainable in this world.
Romans 8:38-39
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Galatians 2:20
I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
1 John 3:16
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
David Clarkson "The Love Of Christ" adapted in Voices From The Past - Puritan Devotional Readings
Ephesians 5:2 - "Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us..."
Christ's love made him willing to suffer for us. He suffered all the misery that our sin deserved. He who caused the vast fabric of heaven and earth to start out of nothing, King of kings and Lord of lords, was content to take upon him the form of a servant. He who was the object of eternal praises was, out of love for us, reviled and slandered as a drunkard, a glutton, a blasphemer, a mad-man, and possessed with the devil. He in whose presence was fullness of joy, was for the love of us, willing to become 'a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief' (Isaiah 53:3). This love made God willing to be made a curse and the Lord of life to die a base, accursed, and cruel death.
There was no sorrow like your sorrow, no love like your love. Was it not enough, dearest Saviour, that you were willing to pray, and sigh, and weep for us perishing wretches? Will you also bleed and die for us? Was it not enough that you were hated, slandered, blasphemed, buffeted, but you were also scourged, nailed, wounded, and crucified? Was it not enough to feel the cruelty of man? Would you also undergo the wrath of God?
O the transcendent love of Christ! Heaven and earth are astonished at it. What tongue can express it? What heart can conceive it? The tongues, the thoughts of men and angels are far below it. O the height and depth and breadth and length of the love of Christ! Our thought are swallowed up in this depth, and there we must be content till glory shall enable us to have no other employment but to praise, admire, and adore this love of Christ.
Thomas Brooks "Christ's Love For Us"
John Bunyan The Saints' Knowledge of Christ’s Love, or The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, on Ephesians 3:18-19
http://www.sounddoctrine.net/Classic_Sermons/John%20Bunyan/saint_know_Christs_love.html
Why should anything have my heart but God, but Christ? He loves me, he loves me with love that passeth knowledge. He loves me, and he shall have me: he loves me, and I will love him: his love stripped him of all for my sake; Lord let my love strip me of all for thy sake. I am a son of love, an object of love, a monument of love, of free love, of distinguishing love, of peculiar love, and of love that passeth knowledge: and why should not I walk in love?
Samuel Rutherford in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert’s, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, 1895
In all our fluctuations of feeling, we do well to remember that Jesus admits no change in His affections …your heart is not the compass Jesus saileth by.
Octavius Winslow The Sympathy of Christ
Was ever love like this? Was it ever equaled? Where shall we find its parallel? Love less divine, less strong, less gentle, could never have won your heart, uprooted your enmity, tore you from your idols; enthroning Christ, all of Christ, Christ only, Christ supremely, Christ forever! The love of Christ will be the wonder, the study, and the song of all pure, holy intelligences through eternity!
Beloved, nothing shall take the love of Christ from you, or separate you from it. It does not ebb with the ebbing of your feelings; it does not chill with the chill of your affections; it does not change with the changing scenes and circumstances of your life. The love of Christ has depths we cannot sound, heights we cannot explore, an infinite fulness and freeness tiding over all the sins, infirmities, and sorrows of its blessed and favored objects.
Seek to know this love of Christ, though it is so vast that it ‘passes knowledge.’ Infinite though it is, you may experience its reality, taste its sweetness, and be influenced by its all commanding, all constraining power. Do not limit your heart experience of Christ’s love, for it is infinite in its nature, and boundless in its extent.
Richard Sibbes
Christ is Best or St Paul’s Strait (Philippians 1:23, 24)
St. Paul loved the person of Christ, because he felt sweet experience that Christ loved him; his love was but a reflection of Christ’s love first. He loved to see Christ, to embrace him, and enjoy him that had done so much and suffered so much for his soul, that had forgiven him so many sins . . .
The Soul's Conflict With Itself
O mercy of all mercies, that when we were once his, and gave away ourselves for nothing, and so became neither his nor our own, that then he would vouchsafe to become ours, and make us his by such a way, as all the angels in heaven stand wondering at; even his Son, not only taking our nature and miserable condition, but our sin upon him, that that being done away, we might through Christ have boldness with God as ours, who is now in heaven appearing there for us, until he bring us home to himself, and presents us to his Father for his forever!
F.B. Meyer
All love in our cold and loveless hearts is the emanation and reflection of the Love which began in Him, was mediated to us in Calvary, and is reflected from us, as sunlight from a mirror.
A.B. Simpson
Christ bids us live in an atmosphere of love. As my Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. (John 15:9) In the original it is, live in my love. Love is the atmosphere in which He would have us constantly live; believing that He ever loves us and claiming His divine approval and tender regard.
Charles Gabriel "I Stand Amazed in the Presence"
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/i/s/isaithep.htm
I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene,
And wonder how He could love me,
A sinner, condemned, unclean.
O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be:
O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
Is my Savior’s love for me!
For me it was in the garden
He prayed: “Not My will, but Thine.”
He had no tears for His own griefs,
But sweat drops of blood for mine.
In pity angels beheld Him,
And came from the world of light
To comfort Him in the sorrows
He bore for my soul that night.
He took my sins and my sorrows,
He made them His very own;
He bore the burden to Calvary,
And suffered and died alone.
When with the ransomed in glory
His face I at last shall see,
’Twill be my joy through the ages
To sing of His love for me.
Selah "O The Deep, Deep Love Of Jesus"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hzYKovRsJ8
Sidewalk Prophets "You Loved Me Anyway"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKMXF21ua9o
Caution
John Flavel The Admirable Love of God in Giving His Own Son for Us on John 3:16
If the greatest love has been manifested in giving Christ to the world, then it follows, that the greatest evil and wickedness is manifested in despising, slighting, and rejecting Christ. It is sad to abuse the love of God revealed in the lowest gift of providence; but to slight the richest discoveries of it, even in that matchless gift, in which God commends his love in the most astonishing manner—this is sin with a witness. Blush, O heavens, and be astonished, O earth; yes, be horribly afraid! There is no guilt like this.
Ian Hamilton, “The Gentleness and Fierceness of Christ” in The Banner of Truth, August – September, 2016
Men and women who should know better (and who do know better but ‘hold down the truth in unrighteousness’, Romans 1:18) have constructed an amenable Jesus, a non-threatening Jesus, a Jesus who is the mirror image of their hopes and desires. This make-believe Jesus is always affirming but never condemning. He is ready, of course, to speak out against sins, but not the sins that are embedded in the hopes and desires of God-denying, commandment-despising, gospel-rejecting men and women. This Jesus is a fiction.
Make sure the Jesus you follow and confess is the Jesus of Holy Scripture.