And my last word to you is, see that you resort only to the sane, sound way of getting rid of the wholesome, rational dread of which I have been speaking. You can ignore it; and buy immunity at the price of leaving in full operation the _causes_ of your dread--and that is stupid. There is only one wise thing to do, and that is, to make sure work of getting rid of the occasion of dread, which is the fact of sin. Take all your sin to Jesus Christ; He will--and He only can--deal with it. He will lay His hand on you, as He did of old, with the characteristic word that was so often upon His lips, and which He alone is competent to speak in its deepest meaning. 'Fear not, it is I,' and He will give you the courage that He commands.
'God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.' 'Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father,' and cling to Him, as a child who knows his father's heart too well to be afraid of anything in his father, or of anything that his father's hand can send.
'We love Him, because He first loved us.'--1 John iv. 19.
Very simple words! but they go down into the depths of God, lifting burdens off the heart of humanity, turning duty into delight, and changing the aspect of all things. He who knows that God loves him needs little more for blessedness; he who loves God back again offers more than all burnt offering and sacrifices. But it is to be observed that the correct reading of my text, as you will find in the Revised Version, omits 'Him' in the first clause, and simply says 'we love,' without specifying the object. That is to say, for the moment John's thought is fixed rather on the inward transformation effected, from self-regard to love--than on considering the object on which the love is expended. When the heart is melted, the streams flow wherever there is a channel. The river, as he goes on to show us, parts into two heads, and love to God and love to man are, in their essence and root-principle, one thing.
So my text is the summary of all revelation about God, the ultimate word about all our relations to Him, and the all-inclusive directory as to our conduct to one another. To know that God loves, and to love again--there is a little pocket encyclopædia in two volumes, which contains the smelted-down essence of all theology and of all morality. Let us look at these three points.
I. The ultimate word about God.
'He first loved us.' Properly and strictly speaking, that 'first' only declares the priority of the divine love towards us over ours towards Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say--first of all, ere Creation and Time, away back in the abysmal depths of an everlasting and changeless heart, changeless in the sense that its love was eternal, but not changeless in the sense that love could have no place within it--first of all things was God's love; last to be discovered because most ancient of all. The foundation is disclosed last when you come to dig, and the essence is grasped last in the process of analysis.
So one of the old psalms, with wondrous depth of truth, traces up everything to this, 'For His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there was time; therefore, there were creatures--'He made great lights, for His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there were judgments--'He slew famous kings ... for His mercy endureth for ever.' And so we may pass through all the works of the divine energy, and say, 'He first loved us.'