I love you with an everlasting love. (Jeremiah 31:3 GW)
"I have borne with you all
this time because I love you; anything could have happened to you, but I have
not let it, I have shown you infinite longsuffering and patience, and earnest
solicitude for your eternal well-being: because I love you, I have kept you
alive, and have brought you to this time and to this place; I have not let you
go." Oh, that this might come home to us! We may, all unconsciously, be hearing
this message now simply because of this infinite love of God which has been
preserving us unto this hour to let us know it. You may think it is quite
fortuitous that you are hearing it – just one of the chance happenings of life;
but if you knew the truth it is this infinite love of God which has held you to
this time in relation to the infinite purposes of that love to let you know it.
There is nothing casual about it, there is sovereign love here. "Because I have
so loved, because, self-sufficient as I am, I cannot do without you" – oh,
mystery of Divine love! – "because I so much wanted you I created you, and now
at this moment I am drawing you." We cannot take that in, but that is the
teaching of the Word of God... God does not want that kind of love that is not love at all
because it gets everything that it wants to satiate its own lusts. That is not
love. This love of God must make us like itself, it must be after its own kind.
And so, strangely enough, many have come to find the love of God through the
dark way of suffering – to discover that God was not their enemy but their
friend, when they thought that He was pursuing with the object of destroying
them....
Listen again, whoever you may be. If you know yourself only a little you must be
amazed at this statement, but if it does not come to you as the most wonderful
thing that ever was or could be, there is something grievously the matter with
you; that such a One should say to such as WE,
"I have loved THEE, with an everlasting love." May
God Himself bring that home to us with something of its implication, something
of its meaning and value, its glory, its wonder. If He should graciously do
that, we shall be worshipers for the rest of our lives; there will be something
about us that is in the nature of awe and wonder and we shall go softly. The
realization of it will smite all our pride to the dust. There is no room for
pride here. This will remove all those horrible things - pride, avarice,
covetousness, self-interest, worldly ambition - and we shall be very humble,
very grateful people, full of a great longing somehow to requite that love,
somehow to win for that One His rights.