Love and I -- a Mystery

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John 17:26

And I have declared to them your name, and will declare it: that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

I. THE FOOD OF LOVE TO GOD.

1. Knowledge. "I have made known." We cannot love a God whom we do not know. Only when the eyes are opened to behold the loveliness of God will the heart go out towards God, who is so desirable an object for the affections.

2. A knowledge given by Christ. It is not knowledge that we pick up as a matter of book learning that will ever bring out our love to the Father. Not knowledge communicated by the preacher alone. "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." He that knows not Christ knows not the Father.

3. Knowledge coming gradually. "And will declare it." As if, though they knew the Father, there was far more to know.

4. Knowledge distinguishing us from the world. It is the mark by which the elect are made manifest (ver. 6).

5. Knowledge of the name of God.

(1) Righteous, and yet a Father. Our joy begins when we see the two united.

(2) The word "name" is used as a sort of summary of all the attributes of God. All these attributes are well adapted to win the love of all regenerate spirits. God is —

(a)  Holy. To a holy mind there is nothing in the world, there is nothing in heaven more beautiful than holiness.

(b)  Good;

(c)  Merciful; "Who is a God like unto Thee."

(d)  Love, and there is a something about love which always wins love.

II. THE LOVE ITSELF.

1. What it is not. The prayer is not that the Father's love may be set upon them, or move towards them, but be "in" them. Christ did not die to make His Father loving, but because His Father is loving.

2. This love is of a very peculiar sort. "The love wherewith Thou hast loved Me."(1) Our Lord desires us to have a distinct recognition of the Father's love to Him. God never loved anything as He loves Christ, except His people, and they have had to be lifted up to that position by the love which the Father has to His Son.

(2) You are to have in your heart a sense of the Father's love to you, and to recollect that it is precisely the same love wherewith He loves His Son. When there was a choice between Christ and His people which should die of the two, the Father freely delivered up His own Son that we might live through Him.

(3) We are to give back a reflection of this love, and to love Jesus as the Father loves Him. The Father is the Sun and we are the moon, but the moonlight is the same light as the sunlight. The moon has not a ray of light but what came from the sun, and we have not a live coal of love to Christ but what came from the Father. We are as the moon, shining by reflected light, but Jesus loves the moonlight of our love and rejoices in it.

(4) This love of the Father in us is to go beaming forth from us to all around.

3. This indwelling of the Father's love in us has the most blessed results.

(1) Has an expulsive result. As soon as ever it gets into the heart it says to all love of sin, "Get thee hence: there remains no room for thee here."(2) A repulsive power by which it repels the assaults of sin.

(3) An impulsive power. It is as when an engine receives fire and steam, and so obtains the force which drives it. Then have you motive power, then are you urged on to this and that heroic deed which, apart from this sublime love, you never would have thought of.

(4) How elevating it is. How it lifts a man up above self and sin; how it makes him seek the things that are above!

(5) How purifying it is!

(6) How happy it makes the subject of its influence! If you are unhappy you want mole of the love of God.

III. THE COMPANION OF LOVE. "I in them." Catch those two words. Here is "love" and. "I" — love and Christ come together. Oh, blessed guests!

1. We are sure that He is where love is; for, where there is love there is —

(1) Life, and where there is life there is Christ, for He Himself says, I am the Life.

(2) The Holy Spirit; but wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is Christ, for the Holy Spirit is Christ's representative.

(3) Faith, for faith worketh by love, and there never was true love to Christ apart from faith.

(4) God, for God is love.

2. You need not go abroad to find the Lord Jesus Christ. He lives within you.

(1) What a blessed sense of power this gives to us. "I in them." Then it is no more "I" in weakness, but, "I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me."(2) Hence we gather the security of the believer.

(3) We should give Christ good entertainment.

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