from the fourth chapter of 1st John.
1st John, 4th chapter, beginning with verse 7.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love
is of God.
And everyone that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God, for
God is love.
And this was manifested, the love of God
toward us, because that God sent his only
begotten Son into the world, that we might
live through him.
Herein is love.
Not that we loved God, but that he
loved us, and sent his Son to be
the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought
also to love one another.
No man has seen God at any time.
If we love one another, God dwelleth in
us, and his love is perfected in us.
Hereby know we that we dwell in him,
and he in us, because he has given
us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and do testify that
the Father sent the Son to be the
Savior of the world.
Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son
of God, God dwelleth in him, and he
in God.
And we have known and believed the love
that God hath to us.
God is love.
And he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in
God, and God in him.
Herein is our love made perfect, that we
may have boldness in the day of judgment,
because as he is, so are we in
this world.
There is no fear in love, but perfect
love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment.
He that feareth is not made perfect in
love.
We love him because he first loved us.
For men say, I love God, and hateth
his brother.
He is a liar, for he that loveth
not his brother whom he hath seen, how
can he love God whom he hath not
seen?
And this commandment have I, this commandment have
we from him, that he who loveth God
loveth his brother also.
Now, after four months of preaching on the
attributes of God, I bring this series quite
conveniently to a close, the last day of
the fourth Sunday of the fourth month.
Sunday of the fourth month.
And I am to preach on the love
of God, that is, God's love for us.
And you may not understand this quite.
I don't know that I do myself.
I only know that this is the hardest
of them all to preach, because it is
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, it is trying
to take the ocean in your arms, or
embrace the atmosphere, or rise to the stars.
Nobody can do it.
So I suppose the best we can hope
to do is to do the best I
can and trust the Holy Spirit to make
up for human lack.
Now, the text says that God is love.
But I want you to know, to begin
with, that this is not a definitive description
of God.
That is, this is not a definition of
God.
Now, this is most important that you get
a hold of this, for there are a
great many crackpot poets and religious people abroad
that are saying, God is love, and love
is God, and therefore all is love, and
all is love, then all is God, and
if all is God, then all is love.
And they are dizzy and happy for the
time being, but they are also very, very
much confused in their theology.
When the scripture says God is love, it
is not defining God.
It does not tell us what God is
in his metaphysical being.
In the first place, the Bible never tells
us what God is in his deep, essential
being.
For you see, nobody can conceive what God
is except God, because God is inconceivable.
And if anyone could conceive it, it couldn't
be expressed because God is ineffable.
And if it could be expressed, it couldn't
be understood because God is incomprehensible.
And therefore, to say that God is love
and mean that God is love, and that
you can equate love with God, is to
go way off in your theology.
If God is love in his metaphysical being,
then God and love are equal to each
other, and God is only equal to love,
and love and God are identical, and we
could worship love as God, and thus we
could worship an attribute of personality and not
the personality, and we would thus destroy the
concept of personality in God and deny in
one sweep all of the attributes of the
deity.
But here is what it means when it
says God is love, but don't forget that
it also says that God is life and
God is life.
But here is what it means when it
says that God is love.
It means that love is an essential attribute
of God's being.
It means that in God is the summation
of all love so that all love comes
from God.
And it means that God's love, we might
say, conditions all of his other attributes so
that God can do nothing except he does
it in love.
Now, keep that in mind.
And in the long run, when we know
as we are known, it will be found
that the damning of a man is an
expression of the love of God as certainly
as the redeeming of a man because God
cannot separate himself into parts and do with
one attribute one thing and with another another.
All that God is does all that God
does.
So when God redeems a man in love
or damns another man in justice, he is
not contradicting himself, but justice and love are
working together in the unitary being of God.
And what do we mean when we say
God is love?
It is what we mean when we say
he is kindness itself.
We say of a man, he is kindness
itself.
We don't mean that kindness and the man
are equated and that they are identical, but
we mean the man is so kind that
kindness is all over him and conditions everything
he does.
So when we say God is love, we
mean that God's love is such that it
penetrates his essential being and conditions all that
he does and that nothing God ever does
or ever did or ever will do is
done separate from the love of God.
Now, let's look at what love is.
And this reminds me a little bit of
what my dear friend Max Reich, the sweet
old Jewish son of a rabbi, an Oxford
graduate and a great saint.
I sat one time having a glass of
milk with him after a meeting, you know,
in a drugstore.
You know, we went in for something really
heavy.
So we had a glass of milk together.
And I said to him, Dr. Reich, what
do you think of Rotherham's work on the
psalms?
And he said, Brother Tozer said, Rotherham botanizes.
He said a botanist takes a flower and
he pulls it apart and he analyzes and
he names the parts.
And when he's through, you have not a
flower, you have botany.
And he said Rotherham takes the psalms and
he analyzes and classifies and breaks down and
pulls apart.
And when you're through, you have not David's
psalms anymore, you have theology.
Well, I thought that was pretty good.
And I feel a little bit self-conscious
now when I try to preach on the
love of God and botanize a little bit,
or to tear the petals off to try
to notice what they are.
But I'll try to be very careful to
put them back together so you won't go
away with a petal and think you have
the whole garden.
Now, the first thing that love is is
a principle of goodwill.
The angel sang goodwill unto men.
And love always wills the good of its
object.
You may settle on that, my friend.
But love always wills the good of its
object and never wills any harm to its
object.
If you love anybody, really love them, you
want to be good to them and to
do good to them.
And you never want any harm to come
to them if you can help it.
That's why John says, love casteth out fear
because there is no fear in love.
If I know a man loves me, I'm
not afraid of him.
If I'm not sure he does, I may
be a bit cagey around him because it's
love that casts out fear.
And when we know we are loved, we
are not afraid.
And whoever has the perfect love, fear has
gone out of the universe for him.
Now, all real fear goes when we know
that God loves us because fear comes when
we're in the hands of somebody that doesn't
will our good.
Take a little child lost in a department
store.
That little child will stand there in a
paroxysm of hysterical fear.
It's afraid.
People's faces are strange and even those who
want to be kind, the child is afraid
because it's afraid it's in the hands of
somebody that wills its harm.
But when it sees the familiar face of
the mother, it runs sobbing to her and
grabs her and climbs into her arms.
It's never afraid in the hands of its
mother because experience has taught it that its
mother wills its good.
Perfect love casts out its fear.
And when the mother is not there, fear
fills the little child's heart.
But the mother's kind, smiling, eager face drives
out fear.
And so it is.
We are born in a world where there
are a great many things against us.
And there are sin and Satan and the
devil and accidents and everything.
And if we are in the hands of
accidents, if we are in the hands of
the devil, if we are in the hands
of sin, then we have something to be
afraid of.
All those little books on how not to
be afraid.
I think they are as ridiculous as can
be.
I don't know.
You know you never can overestimate the ability
of people to be goofy.
They will beat you at any effort you
make, brother, any effort you make.
And people write books on how to conquer
fear.
And you are to sit down and tell
yourself, now there is nothing to be afraid
of.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
The sky smiles and the wind is yours
and the sun.
And about that time you tumble over with
a heart attack.
Or you are stricken with some disease or
you get a telegram your son was killed
in an automobile accident.
Or somebody declares war on somebody else.
It's all so ridiculous to say, don't be
afraid.
A man sitting on a railroad track telling
himself there is nothing to be afraid of,
and five minutes later they are picking him
up in a basket.
Of course there is something to be afraid
of in the world.
Of course there is.
If you are in the hands of chance,
of course there is something to be afraid
of.
And we are a fool if we are
not afraid.
If you are a sinner and a sword
hangs over your head, of course there is
something to be afraid of.
And if you have sinned against God and
not repented, then the judgments of God wait
on you and there is a fearful looking
for of judgment and it is right and
natural that there should be.
But when through the open door of the
cross, through the name and power of Jesus
Christ, I come into the Father's heart, and
God cancels all my past and accepts all
my present and swears his holy name for
all my future, and the love of God
takes me over, then fear goes out of
my heart because love has come in.
I am now not in the hands of
men.
I said years ago, and some last preacher
took me to task force, I said, I
am not in the hands of these delegates.
They can't elect me and they can't kick
me down.
They can't put me in and they can't
put me out.
He came up to me and he said,
you'd be surprised to know how they could.
They can't.
I am in the hands of God, my
brother.
And I appeal away from delegates and I
appeal away from people.
I appeal to the most high God.
And God is my friend through Jesus Christ,
and he wants me to prosper, and therefore
I am not afraid.
I put myself in his hands without fear.
Love casts without fear.
I say that love is a principle of
goodwill, and God wants to be our friend.
And then love is an emotional fixation.
That is, it identifies itself emotionally with its
object.
Now this may sound just a little bit
silly, but have you ever noticed that somebody
you love real well, even their clothes?
You love even their clothes.
Which one of the poets, Ben Johnson it
was, that talked about his girlfriend, the sweetheart,
Sash?
He found that Sash hadn't what they are,
but he found, I guess, a big ribbon
that goes around the waist.
He found one.
And he went around with lugging her, this
thing around, you know, writing poetry about it.
Well, now some of you dignified old boys
sit back there and try to look mean,
but the fact is, it was a day
when you had butterflies in your heart, and
it was a day when just the sight
of her handwriting was enough to set you
off for the day.
And now to get down to our children,
get down to our children.
We look at their pictures, and we love
them, and we will their good, and we
will nothing but their good.
I was thinking when I was thinking and
praying over this sermon, I was thinking about
our little daughter, our young daughter.
She'll be 22 this summer, but she's still
our little girl.
And I was thinking that if it were
known that she had some disease, and that
the doctors, after it was properly declared by
reputable physicians, that she would die unless she
had a blood transfusion, and that if I
gave her a blood transfusion, I would die.
You know, I wouldn't even hesitate.
I wouldn't even, I wouldn't hesitate a second,
not a second.
And I'm not a hero.
I'm just a father.
That's all.
Love emotionally identifies itself with its object.
And I'm perfectly sure that I wouldn't consult
anybody.
I wouldn't question it a moment.
If I knew that she lay at the
point of death in the hospital, and that
to give her my blood was to make
her live long years and let me die,
I'd take it in a second.
I'd lie down there with a smile.
Anybody would that loves your children.
Anybody would that loves.
Love always identifies itself emotionally with its object.
Have you ever seen a thin wisp of
a young mother staggering around carrying a big,
fat baby?
Well, the mother, the mother's literally being, she's
literally being nursed to death, and the baby's
getting fat and happy and slick while the
mother is really suffering under it.
And yet does that mother complain?
Not at all.
She looks down into that little face and
loves it and would give twice that, ten
times that, because she has already identified herself
emotionally with that baby.
Why was it?
Why was it that Peter and John and
Bartholomew and the rest of them were healthy
and Jesus dead?
Why there between Calvary and resurrection?
Why were they walking around eating and drinking
and sleeping, healthy men and Jesus dead?
And in the tomb, because he had identified
himself emotionally with those disciples and with what
he called the world, so that dying for
them was not a hard task.
That's why I never care for mournful songs.
I don't like mournful songs.
I don't like these songs that put Jesus
out there weeping on his own shoulder and
saying, Oh, what a hero I was, and
you don't appreciate it.
Too bad for me.
I never like that kind of song.
They are not healthy.
They are written by men who need psychiatric
treatment.
Jesus Christ never went to his disciples and
said, Now look, I died for you.
Don't you remember my sufferings and my tears
and my groans and my blood?
Never!
He said, And Mary turned and said, Oh,
my.
He never said, I died for you.
He said, Mary.
And so they all threw the New Testament.
That's the difference between the New Testament and
a lot of religious books.
Religious books often are unhealthy.
And the effort to become spiritual, they become
more unhealthy still.
I want to be a healthy Christian.
I want to be healthy-minded.
And I believe it's the will of God
that we should be healthy-minded.
The healthiest man was Jesus Christ, and the
healthiest disciple was Paul.
And we ought to be healthy men and
women.
That's why I can't go much on Good
Friday sitting around moaning and groaning and trying
to follow Jesus through the stations of the
cross.
I could never do it anyhow.
What kind of a child would it be
who would try to follow its mother through
the long hours of labor?
It's enough to say, Thank you, Mother, I'm
here.
And she forgets all about it.
Jesus said she forgets her troubles that a
man is born into the world if she's
healthy-minded.
If she isn't, she writes poetry and cries
on her own shoulder.
Has to go off to a doctor and
have her head examined.
But if she's healthy, she's emotionally identified with
her child.
And so whatever prospers her child, prospers her.
And whatever hurts her child, hurts her.
God was so emotionally identified with the human
race that the devil knew that the only
way he could get at God was through
the human race.
Now, Milton knew that.
Paradise Lost is not an inspired scripture, and
there's much of it that isn't scriptural at
all.
But at center, it's quite scriptural.
And Milton was theologian enough to know it.
And so he pictured the devil figuring out,
talking to those horrible devils of his down
there, those demons, how they could get at
God.
They said, We've been licked outright and there's
nothing we can do.
God's mighty engines have thundered and we're done
for.
We can never hope to go and take
the throne by storm.
What'll we do?
Well, the devil being the devil said, I
think I've got it.
He said, There is talk some about God
going to create a people that will be
after his image and like him.
And he'll love them more than he loves
anything else in his universe.
And if I can get to them and
ruin them, I've hurt God worse than if
I'd overthrown his very dominion.
So he went and hunted up Adam and
Eve and began to talk to them.
Eve first.
And when he brought about the fall of
the human race, he caused injury to the
heart of God because God loved the human
race made in his own image.
And our sins are an emotional wound in
the heart of God.
It says in the book of Hebrews, quoting
from the Psalms, What is man that thou
art mindful of him?
And I've looked it up in the Greek
and I find that word mindful means a
fixture in the mind.
We're a fixture in God's mind.
And the only wonderful, strange eccentricity of the
great free God is that he's allowed himself
to be emotionally identified with me, so whatever
hurts me hurts him.
And whenever I'm in pain, God's in pain.
And whenever I suffer, he suffers.
And Scripture says he makes all our bed
in our sickness.
And God sits beside us and grieves when
we grieve.
So it feels pleasure in its object.
And God is happy in his love.
Love always is happy.
I don't like the expression fall in love.
It smacks a little bit of the barnyard.
But when anybody loves anybody else real well,
they're very happy.
I've met, and you've met, the town mayor,
Woodrow Wilson, longtime president of the United States.
He fell in love with a widow, Mrs.
Gault, G-A-U-L-T.
And he was a dignified old fellow with
a face that long, you remember, and a
big pair of thick glasses?
Professor and president of a college and looked
the part.
And he was so dignified, you know, that
it was a production just to clear his
throat.
But somebody said he met Mrs. Gault and
she bowled him over.
And somebody tells this on him that once
he said, well, he said, I'm going to
get married.
And then he jumped up and did a
little two-step, a little dance around over
the presidential floor.
Imagine a president doing a thing like that.
He did it.
What had happened to the old man?
Well, love had come.
He thought, you know, that that snow that
was on his roof meant the fire had
gone out in the furnace.
But it hadn't really.
There was still some emotion there.
And he was happy to find that love
always makes people happy.
A young mother is always happy over her
baby.
I never saw one that wasn't.
Oh, sometimes they get mad, a little mad
when they get big enough, you know, to
push things over.
But for the most part, love always is
a pleasurable thing.
And God is happy in His love toward
all that He's made.
I've just been reading again those early chapters
in Genesis and there's no escaping the pleasure
God felt in His creation.
It said God made the light and He
said, that's good.
He shook His head, that's good.
He said, He'll like that.
And then He made the dry land to
appear and the seas in one place and
He said, that's good.
And then He made the sun and the
stars and the moon to rule the night
and the day and He said, that's good.
Then He made man and He said, that's
good.
God was an artist and every time He
finished a painting He shook His head and
said, that's good.
God loved it.
He was pleased with what He was doing.
And that's the kind of God I preach
to you tonight.
Not a faraway, dehydrated, sour, salty God hiding
in some imperium.
But I preach to you a friendly God
who is happy in His work.
It's only sin that has brought the curse
and the pain and the grief.
And He has sent His Son to deal
with that sin business, too.
God makes delightful reference to His works and
everything that He has made.
It says, the Lord will rejoice in His
works.
And in Zephaniah 317, let me read this
wonderful passage of scripture.
I don't think anybody believes it.
If we believed it, we'd do like the
President.
We'd do it two steps out of sheer
joy.
The Lord thy God in the midst of
thee is mighty.
He will save, He will rejoice over thee
with joy.
He will rest in His love.
He will joy over thee with singing.
Now listen to that.
God Almighty in the midst of us is
mighty.
And He will save and He will rejoice
over us with joy.
God is happy if nobody else is.
And He will rest in His love and
He will joy over thee with singing.
The eternal God is singing.
That's why I wonder congregations can't sing.
I don't require they sing on pitch.
I just require they sing with joy and
enthusiasm.
I don't mind if the piano is out
of tune and if one fellow is singing
a little step behind the next fellow.
That doesn't bother me.
But it's the lack of warmth and enthusiasm
that makes me question the spirituality of Christians.
Because a Christian church has God in it,
and wherever God is, it says God will
joy over His people with singing.
And the singing of the church has been
the great God singing among His people.
Now, I notice here that Jesus Christ, our
Lord, said about His church in Song of
Songs 4 and 9, Thou hast ravished my
heart, my sister, my spouse.
Thou hast ravished my heart with one glance
of thine eye.
That's in the book of Psalms.
Thou hast ravished my heart with one glance
of thine eye.
And when the Lord says this about His
church, it can only mean one thing.
He feels toward His church as a bridegroom
toward the bride, as a mother toward the
child, as the lover toward the object of
his affection.
And there is a highly satisfying love content
in true Christianity if you go deep enough.
The trouble is we don't go deep enough.
Moody told about the Irishman that heard about
a feather bed, and he found a feather
and lay on it all night and said,
If the one is that hard, I don't
know what the whole pillow full of them
would be.
Moody told that silly thing, but it illustrates
something.
And we just get enough religion to make
us miserable, you know.
If we'd go on, we'd find some of
you are all you know about Christianity as
it won't let you do things.
You say, Well, I can't smoke if I'm
a Christian, and I can't drink if I'm
a Christian, and I can't gamble if I'm
a Christian.
Those are the things you can't do.
Spurgeon said about a certain fellow, he said,
I hope the grass grows on his grave
when he dies because nothing ever grew around
him when he lived.
The fellow said, Mr. Spurgeon, I don't drink,
I don't use tobacco, I don't swear, I
don't attend theater.
And Moody said, Do you eat hay, Mr.
Spurgeon?
And he said, No, I don't.
What do you mean?
He said, I hope you did something.
He said, All up to now, you've been
doing nothing.
And Christianity to some people is only what
you don't do.
You don't do this, and you don't do
that.
That's not Christianity, brother.
The monks, they don't do it.
The fellow that goes naked and sleeps on
spikes, he doesn't do very much either.
He just lies around there and rots.
But that's not Christianity.
There's a love content in Christianity.
And discounting all the irresponsible things people do,
nevertheless, there's a deep healing emotional content in
the Christian life.
And that's why the Bible calls the church
the bride and Christ the bridegroom.
And he means that his people should know
his love, and he means that we should
feel it, sense it.
You know I'm trying to analyze love, and
yet you can't describe love.
For the conclusion of this message, please turn
your tape to side two.
You can't describe love.
You've got to feel love.
You can't describe it.
You can see how it works, but you
can't describe it.
And you don't know it until you've felt
it.
And so with the love of God, it
says in the book of Hosea, the time
would come when they'd no more say Bala.
They would say Eshi, Eshi, meaning husband.
Eshi.
Well, that means that God wants to be
to us what a husband is to a
new wife.
He wants to be to shelter and care
for and love and cherish.
I've often wondered why women were willing to
change their names when they're getting married.
They're Mrs. Smith, and they marry Mortimer Jones.
One of them does.
And she doesn't mind changing from Smith to
Jones.
She's proud of the fact.
And one of the first things you'll say
to her as they're right away with their
hair full of rice is, Well, Mrs. Jones,
how are you?
And she giggles, and she's delighted to death
to take his name.
Take his name, Jones.
What a wonderful name, she says to herself.
Now, I know many a husband has had
his wife paged in the hotel, paging Mrs.
Mortimer Jones.
Oh, she fletched up, you know.
Oh, this is wonderful.
And she'd taken the name of the man
she loved and didn't mind it at all.
Well, my brother and sister, your maiden name
was Adam.
Don't forget that.
Your maiden name was Miss Miss Adam.
And that was your maiden name, but the
Lord wants to give you a new name.
He says, I'll be your husband, and you'll
be called Christians in Antioch.
And the love of God is made us
Christians.
And he's joined us to him in the
warmth of affection.
What a mechanical business marriage would be if
there was no love in it.
What a mechanical business rearing children would be.
Wouldn't it be awful trying to keep them
from committing suicide and getting up, you know,
five times a night to give them a
glass of water they don't need and don't
want?
And fixing bumps they never should have had.
And then when they get older, looking at
those awful grade cards, coming and holding them
behind them, those awful grade cards.
Well, rearing a family would be a terrible
thing except for one thing, the lubrication of
love.
Whenever love is there, everything is all right.
Let me tell that silly little story, and
it's quite a cute one, about I think
it was in India.
And there was a young girl.
She wasn't over nine, and she had a
great big lug of a baby on her
back, and she was carrying it around.
And some visitor said to her, Well, honey,
that's quite a burden you have there.
And she fired up.
She said, That's not a burden.
That's my little brother.
And whatever your little brother isn't your burden.
And whatever is love isn't a burden.
And so God is not having any burden.
That's why I never join, and ever emotionally
or psychologically join with the people that are
pitying the Lord.
Never.
God's happy to do what He did.
He's loved.
And love is joyful, happy to do what
it does.
Well, now if I were to try to
talk about the greatness of love, I know
I'd be here all night.
And I would only run in circles because
I can't speak of that which cannot be
spoken of.
But I've tried to break it down a
little and say that this love of God
is part of God, is an attribute of
God, not part of Him, but an attribute.
And it's eternal and immutable and infinite.
Now, does that mean anything to you?
Yes, it ought to mean something to you.
Meaning it's eternal, it never began to be,
and it can never end.
And immutable means it can never change.
And infinite means there's no boundary to it.
For the love of God is broader than
the measure of man's mind, and the heart
of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
So remember that every time God thinks about
you, He thinks about you lovingly.
And even if He must chastise you, even
if He knows that hardships must come to
you, it's love that allows it to come
and love that sends it.
And though we never should be afraid of
love because love casts out fear.
Ah, God proved His love toward us.
You know, we talk about love, but He
proved His love.
But God commended, that is, He proves His
love toward us in that when we were
yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.
In Hebrews 7, wherefore, He is able also
to save them unto the uttermost that come
unto God by Him, seeing he ever liveth
to make intercession for them.
The same love that created us, that love
redeemed us, and now that love keeps us.
The best preservative in the world is the
love of God.
Some people believe in the security of the
saints from theological grounds.
They take a text somewhere.
I believe in the security of the saints
because God is love and God always keeps
that which He loves.
We always keep what we love, always.
And I hate to take another side and
mention something else, but I just have to
say to you, the soul that can scorn
such infinite love as this, such emotional love,
such eager love, the soul that can trample
it down and turn on it and turn
away from it and despise it, that soul
will never enter God's heaven, never.
For it would never be happy in God's
heaven.
The soul that loves hate and hates love,
the soul that cultivates hate and despises the
love of God would never be happy in
the heaven above.
Sometimes men die and they've been wicked old
scoundrels and the preacher gets up and preaches
them right off into heaven, not knowing that
the worst thing could happen until they go
to heaven.
I read once the story of a man.
He was a very rich man and he
found a little American urchin somewhere in the
slums, sleeping in an old empty barrel down
by the waterfront, sleeping in rags and picking
up what he could get around the alleys
and wherever anybody would give him a handout.
And this rich man decided that he would
take the little fellow to his home.
He took him.
He took him to a mansion where one
room led to another room led to another
room and each one grander and more rich
and luxurious than the other.
And the trembling, timid little fellow was given
an outfit the like of which he had
never even dreamed could exist.
His father, his adopted father took him to
his bed and here there were silk sheets
and silk coverlets and nightlight and all the
beauties that wealth could bring to a boy's
bedroom.
The next morning a maid came to take
him down to his breakfast and there he
ate food that he never knew existed off
of plates so rich and with silverware so
exquisite.
The point of the story was that one
morning after the boy had taken all he
could they went up to get him and
they found nothing there but his good clothes.
They went and looked for the old rags
they had taken from him and stored in
a closet and they were gone.
He got up in the night and got
out of the rich, wealthy clothes that made
him miserable and got back into his old
rags.
He was psychologically conditioned to his dirt neat
rags and his banana peels and his crusts
of bread.
He wasn't conditioned to silk beds and fine
clothes and a rich, luxurious home and he
was miserable there.
So heaven would not be heaven to the
man who has not heaven in his heart.
Heaven will not be heaven to the man
who has not the love of God in
his heart because heaven will be the place
where love fills it as the atmosphere fills
Canada tonight and covers it and drowns it
in rich, life-giving air.
So heaven is filled with love and whoever
does not know the love of God on
earth would not be happy in heaven.
Certainly he won't be happy in hell and
that's the horror of it.
He won't be happy anyplace.
The rich man died.
I heard a great Canadian preacher years ago
come down to the States and preach the
sermon.
What was his name?
Paulman.
A great Canadian preacher.
And he preached on the text and the
rich man died and in hell he lifted
up his eyes.
And the poor man died.
Lazarus died and was in Abraham's bosom.
He said, why?
And he analyzed it and broke it down.
He finally arrived at this conclusion.
The poor man didn't go to Abraham's bosom
because he was poor and the rich man
didn't go to hell because he was rich.
But each man went to his own place
that he had been conditioned for.
Abraham's bosom was the place Lazarus belonged because
Abraham had the love of God in his
heart.
And when he died, the love took him
where he belonged.
And the rich man didn't go to hell
because he ate sumptuously and lived in a
good home.
He went to hell because he had not
the love of God in his heart.
And when he died, he went to his
place.
There's a place for everybody.
And love has opened the door.
But you say, now wait a minute, are
you contradicting yourself?
You say the sinful people and the people
of the world that don't have God's love,
they wouldn't be happy in heaven?
Of course they wouldn't.
But God changes your heart.
The Scripture says that old things pass away
and all things become new.
And God puts the seed of God in
us and we become children of God.
And then we are baptized into the kingdom
of God.
And thus we become acclimated and psychologically conditioned
to the kingdom of God.
You love great hymns and you love to
sing and you love to pray and you
love to talk reverently about God.
And you love the sound of anthems and
the sound of Scripture being read.
Nothing pleases you more than to get up
in the morning and read your Bible.
Nothing pleases you more than to have time
with God in prayer.
All you can get.
If you will live in the face of
God, then you'll be happy in heaven because
you're conditioned for it.
That's what they mean in camp meetings when
the old ladies get down, you know, on
their knees and pray, Oh God, we're having
a heaven to go to heaven in.
Of course you are.
God's already conditioned you and made heaven your
natural habitat.
St. Bernard's great hymn in the Celestial Country,
he says, they're talking about certain pilgrims that
fought their way through to heaven and he
said they'll go to heaven because heaven demands
them.
Heaven demands them because they belong in heaven.
Hell is a place where people go because
they belong there.
God doesn't get mad and say, get out
of here and go to hell.
Not that.
They go where they belong.
They belong there by nature.
The gravitational tug of their moral lives is
toward hell.
People who die and go to heaven, go
to heaven because the gravitational tug of their
moral lives is toward heaven by the blood
of Jesus and the blood of the everlasting
covenant.
Well, I preached on grace last Sunday night
and some people went in and one dear
lady told me, her daughter told me that
she'd started off home and had to come
back and pray.
The Lord met her on Tuesday.
Somebody else told me Wednesday night, said, I'm
on my way walking in.
The grace of God swept over me.
So God's working.
Tonight I've tried to talk about the love
of God.
But it's like going around the world, visiting
every country in the world and spending five
minutes telling your friends about it.
Can't do it.
So I stand here in a few minutes
trying to talk about the love of God.
How can any man do it?
The love of God is so great, the
Spurgeon can't hope to do it justice.
Chrysostom can't hope to rise in the oratory
of the pulpit to describe this vast overwhelming
love of God.
I copied out here a brief paragraph.
My friend Julian, my assistant pastor at home,
used to call her my girlfriend.
She's been dead 600 years, so it's all
right.
But here's what she says.
For our soul is so specially loved of
him that is highest that it overpasses the
knowing of all creatures.
That is to say, there is no creature
that is made that can fully know how
much and how sweetly and how tenderly our
Maker loves us.
Therefore we may with his grace and his
help stand in spiritual beholding with everlasting marvel
of this high, overpassing, inestimable love that Almighty
God has to us of his goodness.
Then she adds this little sentence.
Therefore we may ask of our lover all
that we will.
Therefore we may ask of our lover all
that we will.
He loves us so that there isn't a
creature, not a seraphim, burning in front of
the throne, not a cherubim, shielding the stones
of God, not an archangel, nor an angel,
nor principality, nor power, nor all of them
added together in all the vast universe of
God, can ever hope to know or to
tell how overpassingly great is the love of
God and how tenderly and how sweetly and
how much he loves us.
Well, I go out feeling stronger myself.
I go out feeling better.
What can the world do to a man
or a woman that's drowned in the love
of God, that swims in the ocean of
his love, rolls and turns and leaps and
swims in that love as the fish in
the mighty ocean?
What can the devil do to a person
like that?
What can sin do?
What can the world do?
What can accident do?
Oh, love of God, how little we know
about it and how little we do about
what we know.
May God help us tonight.
If you've been away from him and you're
a backsliding, slidden person or you're an unsaved
person or you're an unbelieving person, dare to
believe tonight that God loves you and dare
to believe he sent his only begotten Son
and dare to believe his Son gave his
life a ransom for you and dare to
believe that if you will trust in him
you shall have everlasting life.
Dare to believe it.
If you've been a wanderer from God, dare
to come home.
Don't add this yet to your sins that
you don't come home.
The girl that gets an impulse to run
away from home and runs away and hides
somewhere and gets a job in a restaurant
when she's only 13 or 14, she reads
in the paper and hears over the radio
how her grieving mother wants her home and
she gets ashamed of herself and then she
gets so ashamed that she feels that she
wouldn't be right for her to go home
after doing what she did.
Why should she add this one more crushing
blow to her mother not to go home
when her mother wants her to go home?
Therefore, why should you add this one more
blow at the heart of God?
If you've been away, sure you have.
You don't deserve to come.
Certainly you don't.
And it looks cheap and little.
Sure it does.
And it's a humbling thing.
Yes, it is.
But are you going to add one more
sin yet?
The sin of refusing to believe that he
loves you?
The sin of refusing to believe that this
God of love is a God whose attribute
is infinite and who calls you to himself?
Come on, prodigal boy.
Come on, prodigal girl.
God never put the light out in the
window when you went away.
It's still there.
Every night he put fresh oil in it
and trimmed it up and said, maybe she'll
come back tonight.
Maybe he'll be home tonight.
For one man it worked.
The prodigal said of the prodigal, he arose
and went.
Will you arise and come?
Whatever the need might be, you dear friends
up in the balcony there.
I don't want to skip you.
I've been looking down preaching here, but I
want you to know I'm talking to you
too.
And if your heart needs God, I want
you to come.
Brother Gray is an excellent personal worker and
counselor.
We have others here.
I'm glad to be available when I'm wanted
and needed.
And this church is a praying church.
Therefore, I invite you while we sing.
What's the number?
This concludes Sermon Number 17.
This also concludes the series on the Attributes
of God, originally taped April 30, 1961 at
the Avenue Road Church.