And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
— Mark 12:33
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.
— Leviticus 19:18
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
— Matthew 7:12
We love him, because he first loved us. If a man 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 we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.
— 1 John 4:19-21
How May We Attain To Love God With All Our Hearts, Souls, And Minds?, by Samuel Annesley. 1620-1696.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
— Matthew 22:37-40
Samuel Annesley was a pastor of the church of St. Giles at Cripplegate. He began a series of informal lectures preached by various Puritan divines, the morning exercises at Cripplegate, which became immensely popular. This sermon was preached at the morning exercises. When taken with the sermon that directly follows it, How Ought We to Love Our Neighbors as Ourselves, the pair forms a tidy exposition of our Lord’s law.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God This is the first and great commandment. Matthew 22:37-38. It is fit that this exercise should begin with a general introduction that may indifferently serve every sermon that shall be preached. I should be much mistaken, and so would you too, should we think this text unsuitable. Let us therefore, not only in the fear, but also in the love of God, address ourselves to the management of it.
This command you have in Deuteronomy 6:5. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. This command is not found in Exodus, nor in Leviticus. but only in Deuteronomy. In other words, the second law of Moses, which as some express it, bore a type of the second law, namely the evangelical, to which this command is proper. For the old law was a law of fear tending to bondage, and therefore Moses mentions the incursion of terror in the giving of it. which when he had dispatched, he begins the following chapter with love, noting that the Holy Ghost will cause the law of love to succeed the law of fear. And it is observable that the Jews read this place with the highest observation. And their scribes write the first and last words of the preface to it with greater letters than ordinary to amplify the fence, and to note that this is the beginning and the end of the divine law. And they read this scripture morning and evening with great religion. The occasion of Christ’s pressing this command upon them at this time was this. When the Pharisees heard how he had baffled the Sadducees and stopped their mouths with so proper and fit an answer that they had no more to say, they consult how they may show their acumen and sharpness of wit to diminish Christ’s credit concerning his doctrine and skill in Scripture. and therefore they choose out one of their most accomplished interpreters of the law, capitiously, to propose an excellent question. They call him Master, whose disciples they will not be. They inquire after the Great Commandment, who will not duly observe the least. They thought Christ could not return such an answer. but that they might very plausibly make exception against it. If Christ should have named any one command to be the greatest, their exception was ready. Why not another as great as that? But Christ’s wisdom shames their subtlety. Christ does not call any command great with the lessening of the rest. but he repeats the sum of the whole law, and distinguishes it in two great commands, according to the subordination of their objects.
Though the excellency of the subject calls for the enlargement of your hearts, yet the copiousness of it requires the contracting of my discourse. To save time, therefore, Let me open my text and case both together. The case is this. The case. What is it to love God with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind? And how may we be able to do it? In short, we must love God as near as it is possible. Infinite. For directions in this case, I shall follow this method.
1. I shall show you what it is to love God with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind.
2. I shall endeavor to demonstrate that it is our unquestionable and indispensable duty so to love God.
3. I shall acquaint you with what abilities are requisite for discharging this duty well, and how to attain them.
4. I shall give you directions on how to improve and augment all the abilities we can get, that we may have a growing love to God.
5. I shall close with the best persuasives I can think of that you would be graciously ambitious of such qualifications and vigorously diligent in such duties.
1. What is it to love God with all the heart, soul, and mind? We must not be too curious in distinguishing these words. The same thing is meant when the words are used singly, as David is said to follow God with all his heart. 1 Kings 14:8. And doubly as Josiah made his people, as well as himself, to covenant, to walk after the Lord with all their heart and all their soul. 2nd Kings 23:3. And where three words are used as thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. Deuteronomy 6:5. And when four words are used as thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thine soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength.” Mark 12:30. Love to God must go through and possess our whole nature and all the powers of it. The mind must think of God The will must delight in God. In short, our whole strength must be employed to please Him. We must love nothing more than God, nothing equal with God. We must love God above all, and that for Himself. But all other things in God and for God. We must be willing to lose all, yea, life itself, rather than to admit anything contrary to the love of God. All these expressions denote the intensity of our affections, the inexpressibleness of our obligation. and the contemptibleness of everything that shall challenge a share in our love. All these expressions admonish us of our infirmity, provoke us to humility, and set us a longing after a better life. It is a notable expression of one. The love of the heart is not understood. but felt. The love of the soul is not felt, but understood, because the love of the soul is its judgment. He that loves God, as he is here commanded, believes that all good is in God, and that God is all that is good, and that without God there is no good. He believes that God is all power and wisdom, and that without God there is neither power nor wisdom. But notwithstanding all that has been spoken, no doubt but there is a singular emphasis in the words, and the Holy Ghost intends a more full declaration of the manner of our love. by these several expressions. Though to be overcritical in the distinguishing of these words will rather intricate than explicate this great command. Yet to follow a plain scriptural interpretation will give light into the duty. Let us inquire therefore,
A. What it is to love.
B. What it is to love God.
C. What it is to love God in that manner here expressed.
A. What is love? Love is an affection of union whereby we desire or enjoy perpetual union with the thing loved. It is not a carnal love I am now to speak of. The philosopher could observe that there can be no true love among wicked men. It is not a natural love, for that may as well be brutish as rational, and divine love is transcendentally rational. It is not merely a moral love. or that consists in a mean, but divine love is always in an extreme. Divine love is a compound of all the former, but it adds infinitely more to them than it borrows from them. Divine love is supernaturally natural. It turns moral virtues into spiritual braces. It engages men to attempt as much for the glorifying of God as all the creatures besides, from the highest angel to the most insensible stone. Better be!
B. What is love to God? Methinks a lax description best suits my design. This divine love It is the unspeakable enlargement of the heart towards God. It is the ecstasy and ravishment of the heart in God. It is the soul’s losing of itself in God. It is the continual working of the heart towards God. Every faculty of the soul is actually engaged. The mind is musing and plotting how to please God and enjoy Him. The will is graciously obstinate. The policy of hell cannot charm it off its object. The affections are all passions in their eager motions towards God. The conscience is a busybody necessitating the whole man to a jealous watch. I said this love is the enlargement of the heart towards God. When the love of God is shed abroad in the heart, it is as the breaking of a ball of lightning. It immediately sets all aflame. It is the unspeakable enlargement of the heart towards God. The highest rhetoric is too flat to express it, as is obvious in that Song of Songs. that song of loves. I have no way to set this out unto you but by words. The plainest and most intelligible expressions I can give you shall be by several similitudes, which I shall pursue until they lead me to admiration. I shall borrow metaphors from things without life, from plants, from sensitive creatures, and from man.
Firstly, the soul’s love to God may be a little shadowed forth by the love of the iron to the lodestone, which arises from a hidden quality, though to say so is but the hiding of our ignorance. The motion of the iron toward the lodestone is slow while at a distance, but quick when near, and when it but touches it. It clings so fast that unless forced, it will never part. And when it is parted, it will, to the farthest part of the world, retain the virtue of its touch. So the soul. While at a distance from God, it moves slowly. But as the Father draws, it runs. And once it comes to be graciously united, The Apostle asks, who shall separate us from the love of God? Romans 8:35. Not only who shall hinder us from partaking of God’s love, but who can take us off from our loving of God? Christ gives the answer. Their union with God, their enjoyment of God, is inseparable. John 10:28-29. though they may have some warping on their parts, as sometimes they will in their imperfect state, and some withdrawing on God’s, yet their love to God, even in the lowest ebb, tremblingly hankers after him. The soul cannot forget its alone resting place. Psalm 116:7.
Secondly, Our love to God is like the love of the sunflower to the sun. It springs up from a very little seed. It is not only our faith, but our love that is at first like a grain of mustard seed. It grows the fastest of any flower whatsoever. It is not only faith, but love that grows exceedingly. 2 Thessalonians 1:3. It always turns and bows itself towards the sun. Our love to God is always bowing and admiring, always turning to and following after God. It opens and shuts with the sun’s rising and setting. Our love, when it is what it should be, opens itself to God and closes itself against all other objects. It brings forth seed enough for abundance of other flowers. Love to God is the most fruitful grace in that when it blossoms and buds, it fills the face of the world with fruit. Isaiah 27:6.
Thirdly, our love to God is like the love of the turtle dove to her mate. God’s people are his turtle dove. Psalm 74:19. I grant they most properly resemble brotherly love, but why not our love to God? They never associate with other birds. The loving soul keeps fellowship with God and, out of choice, with Him only and those that bear His image. The turtle dove never sings and flies abroad for recreation as other birds do, but they have a peculiar note for each other. The soul that loves God flutters not about for worldly vanities. No recreation is so sweet to them as communion with God, for the soul’s converse with God is unique. When one dies, the other droops until it dies, so that they do, as it were, live and die in the embraces of each other. So too the soul that loves God. His loving kindness is better than life. Psalm 63:3. And there is nothing makes a saint more impatient of living than that he cannot have a full enjoyment of God while he lives. Fourthly, Our love to God should be like, though exceeding, Jacob’s love to Benjamin. Genesis 42:38. He’ll starve rather than part with Benjamin. And when hunger forced him from him, and he was like to be kept from him for a while, Judah offers to purchase his liberty with his own, because his father’s life was bound in the lad’s life. Genesis 44:30. In the same way, the soul that loves God is not able to bear the thought of parting with Him. His life is bound up in enjoying the presence of God. I have been too long, but oh that I could affect your hearts as well as inform your judgments with what it is to love God.
C. Now then let us resume the inquiry.
Firstly, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. What is it to love the Lord our God with all our heart? Some refer this to the thoughts of the vegetative soul. Some to the understanding that it may be free from error. Others lay up all these things in their hearts. But the other words will take in most of these. And therefore, according to the Scriptures, we must understand the will and affections. And so the word is taken. Moses, the servant of the Lord, charged you to love the Lord your God with all your heart. Joshua 22:5. As out of the heart proceeds life, Proverbs 4:23, So, from the will proceeds all operations. The will ought to be carried toward God with its whole force. All the affections of a pure and holy heart are directed only to the love of God. Love rises from the will. Now there is a two-fold act of the will. The first is that which is immediately drawn forth from the will itself, the will’s own act, and such an act the will exerts in loving God. There is also the commanded act of the will, which is the act of some other power moved to that act by the will. Where the will is filled with the love of God, it moves the understanding to meditate on the God whom we love. and to inquire after the excellency of the object loved. We must not love God only with heart, but with the whole heart. Pray I you, mark this. Perfect hatred and perfect love knows no such thing as the world calls prudence. If you perfectly hate anyone, all things about him displease you. Whatever he says or does, though it be ever so good, it seems to you to be evil. So also, if you perfectly love anyone, all things about him please you. Some expound this totality by the distinction that we are to love God with the whole heart, both positively and negatively. Positively, where all powers of the will are set to love God, and this we cannot perfectly do while we are travelers until we come to our heavenly country. And negatively, for we shall so love God that nothing contrary to the love of God shall be entertained in our hearts. And this we may attain to a pretty tolerable perfection of in this life.
By the whole heart is not meant either a divided and dispersed heart or a remiss and sluggish heart. God does as much abominate a partnership in our love, as a husband or wife abhors any such thing in their conjugal relation. We must love nothing but God, or that which may please God. He that loves God with his heart, yet not with his whole heart, loves something else and not God. As the whole heart is opposed to a remiss and sluggish heart, the meaning is this. The care of our heart should be set upon nothing so much as upon the loving and pleasing of God. We must prefer God alone before all other objects of our love, and there must be an ardency of affection. Whatever we do, it must be for His sake and according to His will.
Second, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul. I forbear to mention the different conjectures of those that try the acuteness of their parts to produce some peculiar interpretation which others have not. By comparing scripture with scripture, the sensitive life or the sensitive appetite is here meant. Thus, his soul clave unto Dina, and he loved the damsel. Genesis 34:3. Again, thy soul longeth to eat meat. Deuteronomy 12:20. And because the soul is in many places taken for life, as Exodus 4:19, all the men are dead that sought thy life. Hebrew, thy soul, so Exodus 21:23, thou shalt give life for life. The Hebrew is soul for soul. So we may take it here intensively for the sensitive appetite and extensively for the life. The soul is here taken for the animal life, which comprehends both the vegetative and sensitive parts. To love God with the soul is to subject all those works that pertain to an animal life unto the love of God. Plainly and in short, it is not enough to love God in our will, but we must not admit anything contrary to the love of God in our sensual delights. Whatsoever sensualists do for the gratifying of their lusts and desires, Let those things be drained from the dregs of sin and consecrate them all unto God. Whatever use wicked men make of their souls in a way of hatred of God, we must make the contrary use in a way of loving of God. We must be ready to lay down our lives for God. If anyone should be asked what in all the world was most dear unto him, he would answer, his life. For life’s sake, tender mothers have cast off the sense of nature and fed upon their own children. It is life that affords us being, sense, motion, understanding, riches, and dominions. If a man had the empire of the world, he could enjoy it no longer than he had his soul in his body. When that is gone, he presently becomes a horrid carcass, or rather a loathsome dunghill. Now then, if a man loves his life so much, why should he not love God more? by whom he lives and from whom he expects greater things than this life. God is the soul of our soul and the life of our life. He is nearer to us than our very souls. In Him we live and move and have our being. Acts 17:28. Even He that weighs these things indifferently will acknowledge that it is no rashness to call a man that does not love God a monster. How then can we think of it without grief that the whole world is full of these monsters? Almost all men prefer their money pleasures, honors, or lusts before God. So often as you willingly break any law of God to raise your credit or estate, you prefer the dirt and dust of the world before God. Alas, what use does a wicked man make of his soul but to serve his body? whereas both soul and body should be wholly taken up with not only the service but the love of God. Then may you be said to love God with all your soul, when your whole life is filled with the love of God, when your worldly business truckles under the love of God. The love of the dearest relations should be but hatred when compared with your love to God. When you eat and drink to the glory of God, sleep no more than may make you serviceable unto God. When your solitary musings are about engaging your soul to God, when your social conference is about the things of God, when all acts of worship endear God to you, when all your duties bring you nearer to God, when the love of God is the sweetness of your mercies and your cordial afflictions, when you can love God under amazing providences as well as under refreshing deliverances, then you may be said to love God with all your soul.
Third, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind. Though Anselm takes this for the memory that we should remember nothing whereby we are hindered in our thinking of God, yet generally this is taken for the understanding, and so the evangelist Mark expressly interprets it when he renders this command in these words. with all thy understanding.” Mark 12:33. To love God with our minds is to have the understanding moved and commanded by the love of God, to assent unto those things that are to be believed, and to admit nothing into the understanding which is contrary to the love of God. The mind should let nothing go in or out except that which pays a tribute of love to God. One has interpreted the word mind by the etymology of the word measuring. The mind must be so full of love to God that love must measure all our works. 1st Corinthians 10:31. When we eat we should think how hateful it is to God that we should indulge our palate, and thence shun gluttony. When we drink, we should think how abominable drunkenness is in this side of God, and thence drink temperately, so that whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live therefore or die, We are the Lord’s. Romans 14:8. Our life and our death must be measured by our love to God. We must love God with all our mind. We must always converse with God in our mind and thoughts. Our thoughts must kindle our affections of love. Love to God makes the hardest commands easy. While our thoughts are immersed in love to God, love to enemies will be an easy command. The keeping under of our bodies by mortification will be an easy work. Persecution for righteousness will be a welcome trial. For love will change death itself into life. fourth. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength. There is another word added by Mark which indeed is in Deuteronomy 6:5 whence this is taken. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength.
Now because this word does not express any other species or power of the soul but only notes the highest and most intense degree of love that flows from all the faculties of the soul, I will close this inquiry with a word about this. We are to love God with all the powers of our soul, with all the members of our bodies, our understandings, wills, inward and outward senses, appetite, speech, whatever we have, whatever we are, all must be directed into the love of God and into obedience flowing from love. You commonly hear that saying of Bernard. The cause of loving God is God himself and the only measure is to love him without measure. We must love God strongly and with all our strength. Our love to God must get above interruptions. No threatenings, calamities, or discommodities whatsoever must pull us away from God. Rather, all powers of soul and body must be taken up into His service. Our eyes should be beholding the wonderful works of God, the sun, moon, and stars, the clear evidences of His divinity, so that we may be in love with Him. Our ears should be piously hearkening to His instructions, so that we may be in love with Him. Our mouths should love to praise Him, our hands to act for Him, our feet that they may be swift to run the way of His commandments. Our affections must be withdrawn from earthly things and delivered over to the love of God. Whatever is within us, it may be bound over to the service of God. He that loves God in this manner need not trouble himself with how to order and dispose the several words here used, his heart, soul, mind, will. Whatever he is, has, knows, understands, or obtains is all due to God. Neither is there anything in the whole world to be valued before God, and thus I have given you a lame account of what it is to love God.
2. The second thing I undertook was to prove demonstratively that it is our indispensable duty thus to love God. To love God is our great natural duty. Man would more naturally love God than himself were it not for sin. Neither angels nor men were at first commanded to love God. Nature needed no spur to this duty. The law of love was implanted in nature. Augustine says, Thou hast made me, O Lord, and my heart is unquiet till it comes to Thee. O my heart, every creature expels you from them, and that not without shame, that thou mayest go to God. They say, as it were, O miserable wretch, why do you adhere to me? I am not the good which you require. Oh my soul, why do you go thirsting among the creatures to beg some drops that will rather provoke than quench thy thirst? Why do you leave that everlasting fountain whereby you may be perfectly satisfied? What can you desire that is not fully and perfectly to be had in God? I shall at present urge no other demonstration than Christ’s reason in the following verse. This is the first and the great commandment. Not that any command of God is small. The commands in Scripture are like the stars on the firmament, which, though to ignorant persons they are but like twinkling candles, yet are greater than the whole earth. Even so, These commands that careless persons overlook as inconsiderable are such as without respect unto them there’s no salvation. I grant that there is a difference in the commands. For example, the command about paring the nails, Deuteronomy 21:12, is of lesser moment than that of having no other God, Deuteronomy 5:7. And in the same way, Christ threatens the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy, that they were so exact in tithing from their gardens, yet so remiss in looking to their hearts. Matthew 23:23. But among the commands and the diversity of them, Christ tells us that this is the greatest. Some of the Jews counted the command about sacrifice to be the greatest, as is hinted in the scribes’ saying, that this command of loving God is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. Mark 12:33. Others counted that of circumcision to be the greatest. Others that of the Sabbath. observes that it is good that Christ decides the controversies. Though the truth is he that willingly breaks the least commandment will not hesitate to break the greatest. While only one sin makes us to endure another, for men’s lusts cross one another, when occasion serves that a sin shall be ventured upon, the others are now also entertained. This upon a manifold account is the great command.
A. Respect of the object. It is God, the chiefest being, the first and chiefest good. What am I, Lord, says Augustine, that thou commandest me to love thee, and threatenest me with misery if I do not love Well this is no small aggravation of the devil’s torments, that he cannot love God. God may require many things of us, but he requires nothing like this of our love, because this is the only thing wherein we can answer God. In other things we cannot or may not render God like for like. God created us and gave us our being. But we can do nothing like this for God. God preserves us in safety and daily confers innumerable benefits upon us. God delivers from innumerable dangers, both of soul and body. There is none of all this to be done for God. God is infinitely above all such returns. And there are other things wherein we may not render God like for like. If God is angry with us, we may not be angry with Him. If He reproves us, we must not quarrel with Him. If God judges us, we must not censure Him. But now God loves us, and through grace we are able to love Him again. He loves us. and God commands us to love Him again. It is true that there is no equality between God’s loving of us and our loving of God. God’s love does infinitely overcome ours, but yet our love to God speaks interest in union, for the thing loved gives the name to the love. Love is but an indifferent passion until it is united to the thing loved, and then it gets a denomination. For example, if the object is earthly, it is an earthly love. If sensual, it is a brutish love. If it is a man, or if it is man, it is an humane love. If God, it is a divine love. so that by our love we are changed and transformed into a thing more noble, or more vile. We therefore debase ourselves in loving anything but God, for there is nothing else worthy of our love. Whatsoever we love, we give it a kind of dominion over us, so that the will loses its dignity and excellency when it loves inferior things. We are, as it were, married to that which we love. Ray Mundus says, Suppose a poor man of mean flocks and no reputation has six daughters. They are all equal by birth as to reputation and esteem, but they are all different by their marriages. The eldest marries a farmer, the next a citizen, the third a knight, the fourth a duke, the fifth a king, the sixth an emperor. By these marriages there is a very great inequality. So here by the object of your love you are dignified or debased. But there is more yet in God’s being the object of our love. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and therefore you must love him. those things that are ours, though they are not always lovely, yet we love them, our own children, whether of our bodies or our minds, our own estates. We are more troubled at the loss of anything wherein our own propriety is concerned than in all the world besides. A small thing of our own is a thousand times more to us than a thousand times as much of another’s. we are more concerned for the cutting off our own finger than the cutting off of another man’s head. Propriety exceedingly heightens love, especially if it is impossible to have any lack of it repaired. For example, my child and mine only child. Whatever you say of God, you may put an only to it. God loves every gracious soul as if he had no other person to bestow his love upon. Therefore you must love God as if there were nothing else in the world to bestow your love upon. Alas, whatever outward things are yours today may be gone from you tomorrow. But you cannot say this of God. Once yours is forever yours. But perhaps you will say, were God mine, you should need to say no more to inflame my heart to love him. Propriety in God. If I could attain this, I would have enough. This is what I wait for. I pray for. I think nothing too much for it. I only fear I shall never attain it. The very comforts of my life are embittered for lack of it. To this I answer. We cannot shake off God’s sovereignty over us, nor His propriety in us. God is and will be thy God, thy Lord, thy Sovereign, thy Commander. Let thy carriage be what it will. The vilest wretches in the world cannot send themselves out from under God’s dominion. But there is no comfort in this, you may say. Well then, I will therefore add that you that mourn after propriety in God, God is your God, your gracious God and Father, your God in covenant, your God in mercy and love and kindness. Do you unfeignedly desire to love God? Then you may be sure God loves you, for God loves first. 1 John 4:19. Do you not out of choice prefer the service of God before all other service? Then you shall abide in the love of God. John 15:10. Brethren, love God as if he were peculiarly yours and you will thereby have an evidence that he is peculiarly yours. It is reported of one that continued a whole night in prayer and said nothing but this, my God and my all, or God is mine and all mine, repeating this a thousand times over. Let this be the constant breathing of your soul to God, my God, my all.
B. This is the first and great command in respect of order and dignity. This is the great command because we must place this before all others in the very inner core of the heart as the only foundation of piety. whatsoever is taught in the law and in the prophets flows from this, is from a fountain. It grows upon this as upon a root. If I forget not, this is somewhere Augustine’s metaphor. This is to the other commands as the needle to the thread. It draws all after it.
C. This is the first and great, commanded in respect of obligation. To love God is so indispensable that, let me with reference say, God cannot dispense with it. As God first bestows His love upon us before any other gift, and then whatever He gives afterwards, He gives it in love. So, God requires that we first give him our hearts, our love, and then do all we do out of love to God. Sometimes God will have mercy and not sacrifice. Divine duties shall give place to humane. Nay, sometimes duties to God must give way to duties to a beast. Luke 14:5. But however duties to God and men may be jostled to and fro, yet there is not any duty that can warrant the intermitting of any love to God for so much as one moment.
D. This is the first and great command, in respect of the matter of it. Love to God is the most excellent of all graces. 1 Corinthians 13:13. Among the graces, love is like the sun among the stars, which not only enlightens the lower world, but communicates light to all the stars in the firmament. So, also, love to God does not only its own office, but the offices of all other graces. Here the apostle means four graces that are necessary to government, which love does all their offices for seven. Firstly, love beareth all things. In other words, love parts with something of its right and bears the weakness of friends to preserve concord. Secondly, Love believeth all things, that is, candidly makes the best interpretation of all things, is not distrustful nor suspicious upon light and frivolous occasions. Thirdly, love hopeth all things, that is, gently waits for the amendment of that which is faulty. Fourthly, love endureth all things, that is, patiently bears injuries. If you consider that this is spoken of love to men, I readily answer that surely love to God, for whose image in men and command concerning men we love them, will do greater things.
E. This is the first and great command in respect of the largeness of it. This requires the whole man, the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole mind, the whole strength. Whatever else we entertain, some other room may be good enough for it. Let the heart be kept for God’s peculiar presence chamber. God requires the whole soul, all the inferior powers of the soul. Our whole life must be spent in the love of God. This command reaches the whole mind and God expects that we should, in judgment, reason down everything into contempt that should pretend a loveliness to jostle out God. L
F. This is the first and great command in respect of its capacity because it contains all commands. No man can love his neighbor unless he loves God and no man can love God without observing all his commandments. Origen makes inquiry of how the commands about legal purification may be reduced to the love of God. Well, every command of God has its peculiar obligation. But this law of love has a super engagement over them all. For example, men may accept and commend several duties to them that have not one drop of love in them. If I give bread to one that is ready to famish or medicine to one that is dangerously sick, These things do good according to their own natures and not according to the goodwill of the giver. Alas, man needs relief and catches at it and never examines the heart or end from whence it comes. But God is infinitely above needing anything from us. It is His gracious condescension to receive anything from us, and therefore God never accepts of anything we do but what is done out of love to Him.
G. This is the first and great command in respect of the difficulties of it. This is because through our infirmities, not to mention worse, we cannot presently love The prime difficulty is the spirituality of it. This wisdom is too high for foolish sinners. Proverbs 24:7. Though it is most rational, yet it is the most spiritual, and consequently the most difficult part of religion.
H. Some commands may be observed without special grace, as all the outside of religion. Yea, some commands may be observed without so much as common grace, as duties merely moral. But this must have a great measure of the Spirit. It speaks much acquaintance with God through experience of His ways and much conformity to Christ in a well composed conversation. In short, It includes the highest perfection possibly attainable in this life. Yet let not this difficulty frighten you, for though Christ our sincere love, though weak, is accepted, and our imperfect love, because growing, shall not be despised. Let her age. This is the first and great command in respect of the end. All the commands of God are referred to, this as their end and last scope, which was first in the mind of the lawgiver.
I. This is the first and great command in respect of the lastingness of it. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. It is not only spoken after the Hebrew way of commanding, but it notes singular perseverance. Most of the other commands expire with the world, as all or most of the commands of the second table, but this remains and flourishes more than ever. When repentance and mortification, which now take up half our life, when faith, which is now mother and nurse to most of our races, when hope, which now upholds weak faith in its languors, when all these shall die and travail as perfection of grace is being born, even then love to God shall be more lively than ever. That love which passed between God and the soul in letters and tokens shall then be perfected in a full enjoyment. Our love was divided among several objects that cut the banks and weaken the stream. Henceforth it shall have but one current. Our love is now mixed with fear, fear of missing or losing what we love. But that fear shall be banished. There shall never be any distance, never anything to provoke jealousy. never anything to procure cloying, never anything more to be desired than is actually enjoyed. Therefore this is not the first and great or therefore is this not the first and great commandment? Is it not our privilege and happiness to be swallowed up in it? This may suffice to evidence it to be our duty. But then,
3. What abilities are requisite to the performance of this duty, and how may we attain those abilities? This we must be appointed with by our own experience, or all I can say will at best seem to be babbling. Therefore, let me at first tell you plainly Nothing on this side of regeneration can capacitate you to love God. And it is God alone that gives, works, infuses, and impresses the gracious habit of divine love in the souls of his people. Our love to God is nothing else but the echo of God’s love to us. Through the corruption of our nature, We hate God. God implanted in our nature an inclination to love God above all things amiable. But by the fall, we have a headlong inclination to depart from God and run away from Him. And there is in every one of us a natural impotency and inability of turning unto God. The grace of love is no flower of nature’s garden, but a foreign plant. We may possibly do something for the merely rational inflaming of our hearts with love to God. For example, God may be represented as most amiable. We may be convinced of the unsatisfyingness of the creature. We may understand something of the worth of our souls. And what a folly it is to expect that anything but God can fill them! And yet this will be, at the most, but like a solid proof of the truth of the Christian religion, which may nonpluss our cavils, but not make us Christians. This may make love to God appear a rational duty. but it will not of itself beget in us this spiritual grace. It is the immediate work of God to make us love Him. I do not mean immediate in opposition to the use of means, but immediate in regard of the necessary efficacy of His Spirit. beyond which all means in the world without His powerful influence can amount unto. It is the Lord alone that can direct our hearts into the love of God. 2 Thessalonians 3:5. God is pleased in a wonderful and inexpressible manner to draw up the heart in love to Him. God makes use of exhortations counsels and reproofs, but though he works by them and with them he works above them and beyond them. The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart and the heart of thy seed to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul that thou mayest live. Deuteronomy 30:6. And again I call heaven and earth to record this day against thee, that I have set before thee life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live, that thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice. and that thou mayest cleave unto him. For he is thy life and the length of thy days.” Verses 19 through 20. He is effectively your life and that by love, says Aquinas. It is reported that it often happens among partridges that one steals away another’s But the young one that is hatched under the wing of a stranger, at her true mother’s first call, who laid the egg once she was hatched, she renders herself to her true mother and puts herself into her covey. Thus it is with our hearts. Though we are born and bred up among Tyrene and base things under the wing of corrupted nature, Yet at, and not before, God’s first quickening call, we receive an inclination to love Him. And upon His drawing, we run after Him. Song of Solomon 1:4. God works a principle of love in us, and we love God by that habit of love He has implanted. Hence the act of love is formally and properly attributed to man as the particular cause. I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. Psalm 18:1. And I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice. Psalm 116:1. The soul works together with God in his powerful working. The will being acted upon by God acts. It is a known saying of Augustine, the wheel doth not run that it may be round, but because it is round. The Spirit of God enables us to love God, but it is we that love God with a created love. It is we that acquiesce in God in a gracious manner. What God does in the soul does not hurt the liberty of the will, but strengthens it, in sweetly and powerfully drawing it into conformity with the will of God, which is the highest liberty. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 2 Corinthians 3:17. It is a poor liberty that consists in an indifference. Do not the saints in heaven love God freely? Yet they cannot help but love Him. As the only efficient cause of our loving God is God Himself, So the only procuring cause of our loving God is Jesus Christ, that Son of the Father’s love, who by His Spirit implants and actuates this grace of love which He has merited for us. Christ has made peace through the blood of His cross. Christ has merited this grace of love for us, even as He has merited the reward of glory for us. Therefore, dear Christians, plead the merit of Christ for the inflaming of your hearts with the love of God, that when I shall direct to rules and means of how you may come to love God, you may as well address yourselves to Christ for the grace of love, as for the pardon of your lack of love hitherto. Bespeak Christ in some such but far more pressing language. Lord, you have purchased the grace of love for those that want and crave it. My love to God is chilled. Lord, warm it. My love is divided. Lord, unite it. I cannot love God as he deserves. Oh, that you would help me to love him more than I can desire. Lord, make me sick with love and then cure me. Lord, make me in this as conformable to you as much as it is possible for an adopted son to be like one naturally born. that I may be a son of God’s love, both actively and passively, and in these, as near as possible, infinitely. Let us therefore address ourselves to the use of all those means and helps whereby love to God is nourished, increased, excited, and exerted. I will begin with removing of the impediments. We must clear away the rubbish before we can so much as lay the foundation.
Impediment 1. Self-love. This the Apostle names as Captain General of the Devil’s Army. whereby titular Christians manage their enmity against God. In the dregs of the last days, this will make the times dangerous. Men shall be lovers of their own selves, 2 Timothy 3:1-2. When men overestime themselves, their own endowments of either body or mind, when they have a secret reserve for self in all they do, self-applause or self-profit, this is like an error in the first concoction. Get your hearts discharged of it, or you can never be spiritually helpful. The best of you are too prone to this. I would therefore commend it to you to be jealous of yourselves of this particular, for as conjugal jealousy is the bane of conjugal love, So self-jealousy will be the bane of self-love. Be suspicious of everything that may steal away or divert your love from God.
Impediment 2. Love of the world. This is so great an obstruction that the most loving and best beloved disciple that Christ had said, Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” 1 John 2:15. And the Apostle James makes use of a metaphor, calling them adulterers and adulteresses that keep not their conjugal love to God tight from leaking out toward the world. He charges them as if they knew nothing in religion, if they knew not this, that the friendship with the world is enmity with God.” James 4:4. And it is a universal truth without so much as one exception, that whomsoever would be a friend of the world must by necessity, upon that very account, be God’s enemy. The Apostle Paul adds more weight to those that are even pressed to hell already. They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil, which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith and pierce themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things. 1st Timothy 6:9-11. When men will be somebody in the world, they will have estates, honors, and pleasures. What a variety of vexatious distractions there are, ready to unavoidably hinder our love to God. Our hearts are hurried with hopes and fears about worldly things, and yet the world has not wherewithal to satisfy us. How does the heart fret under its disappointments, and how can it do otherwise? We would have happiness here and yet. Sirs, I’ll offer you fair Name me but one man that ever found a complete happiness in the world, and I dare promise you shall be the second. And if you will flatter yourself with dreams of impossibilities, this way will be your folly, though it is likely that your posterity will approve your sayings and try experiments while they live as you have done. Psalm 49:13. But where is your love to God all this while? It is excluded. And by what law? By the law of sin and death. By the love of the world and destruction. For Christ tells us all that hate him love death. Proverbs 8:36.
Impediment 3. Spiritual sloth and carelessness of spirit. When men do not trouble themselves about religion, nor anything that is serious, love is a busy passion, a busy grace. Among the passions, love is like fire among the elements. Love among the graces is like the heart among the members. Now that which is most contrary to the nature of love must by necessity most obstruct the highest actings of it. The truth is, a careless frame of spirit is fit for nothing. A sluggish, lazy, slothful, careless person never attains to any excellency of any kind. What is it you wouldn’t trust a lazy person with? Let me say this, and pray think on it twice, before you censure it once. Spiritual sloth does Christians more mischief than scandalous relapses. I grant that their grosser falls may be worse as to others, grieving the godly and hardening the wicked, and that the reproach to religion must be so great as to make a gracious heart tremble at the thought of falling. But yet, as to themselves, a slothful temper is far more detrimental. For example, those gracious persons that fall into any open sin, it is but once or seldom in their whole life, and their repentance is ordinarily as notorious as their sin. And they walk more humbly and more watchfully than ever. On the other hand, spiritual sloth runs through the whole course of our life, marring every duty, strengthening every sin, and weakening every grace. Sloth, I may rather call it unspiritual sloth, is a soft moth in our spiritual wardrobe, a corroding rust in our spiritual armory, an enfeebling consumption in the very vitals of religion. Sloth and carelessness without an epithet. Bearsloth without anything to aggravate it. Ordinarily does the soul more hurt than all the devils in hell, yea, than all its other sins. Shake off this and then you will be more than conquerors over all their difficulties. Shake off this, and there is but one sin, though I can think of it present, that you will be in danger of, and that is spiritual pride. You will thrive so fast in all grace, you will grow up into so much communion with God, that unless God sometimes withdraws to keep you humble, you will have a very heaven upon earth.
Impediment 4. The love of any sin whatsoever. The love of God and the love of any sin can no more mix together than iron and clay. Every sin strikes at the being of God. The very best of saints may possibly fall into the very worst of pardonable sins, but the least of saints get above the love of the least of sins. We are ready to question God’s love unto us, even as Delilah did Samson’s love to her, if he does not gratify us in all we have a mind to. But how could Delilah pretend to love Samson while she conspired against him with his mortal enemy? How can you pretend to love God while you hide sin, his enemy, in your hearts? as it was with the grandchild of Athalia, stolen from among those that were slain and hidden, though unable at present to disturb her, before Long procures her ruin, 2 Kings 11. So any sin stolen, as it were, from the other sins to be preserved for mortification, will certainly procure the ruin of that soul that hides it. Can you hide your sin from the search of the word and forbear your sin while under the smart of affliction and seem to fall out with that sin when under grips of conscience, only to return to it as soon as the storm is over? Never pretend to love God. God sees through your pretenses and abhors your hypocrisy. His eyes are upon the ways of men, and seeth all his goings. There is no darkness nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.” Job 34:21-22. Come, sirs, let me deal plainly with you. You are shameful strangers to your own hearts if you do not know which is your darling sin or sins And you are traitors to your own souls if you do not endeavor a thorough mortification. And you are willful rebels against God if you do indulge it in the least. Never boggle at the psalmist’s counsel. Ye that love the Lord hate evil. Psalm 97:10.
Impediment 5. Inordinate love of things lawful. In some respect this is our greatest danger. For here we have scripture to plead for our love to several persons and things. For it is our duty to bestow some degree of love upon them. But the stones are not so plainly set as to easily discern the utmost bounds of what is lawful and the first step into what is sinful. Here we have some plausible pretenses for the parceling out of our love. We plead not guilty, though we do not love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds. Whereas we should consider that the best of the world is not for enjoyment, but use. Not our end, but a means of conducing to our chief end. Here is our sin and our misery, our foolish transplacing of end and means. Men make it their end to eat and drink and get estates and enjoy it in delights. And what respect they have to God, they show it but as a means to flatter God and to gratify themselves and their pitiful ends. Having warned you of some of the chief impediments, I shall propose some means to engage your hearts in love to God, which you may confidently expect to be effectual through the operation of the Holy Ghost, and you may likewise expect the operation of the Spirit in the use of such means. The means are either directing, promoting, or conserving.
A. directing means. Namely, this is spiritual knowledge. It is beyond what can be spoken in its commendation. It is a clear and distinct knowledge of the love and loveliness of God in the amazing yet ravishing methods of its manifestations and the clear understanding of the heavenly privilege of having our hearts inflamed with love to God. I would eagerly persuade you to plainly get and exercise this two-fold knowledge.
1. The knowledge of spiritual things. Did we but perfectly know the nature of the most contemptible insect? Nay, did we but know the nature of atoms? This would lead us to admire and love God. but then to know those things that no graceless person in the world cares for the knowledge of. For example, the inward workings of original sin and how to undermine it, the powerful workings of the spirit of grace and how to improve it. What are the joys of the Holy Ghost and how we might obtain them? Would not such things insinuate the love of God into you? Add then,
2. The knowledge of ordinary things in a spiritual manner. This will make the knowledge of natural things serve heavenly designs. Christ revealed this kind of knowledge in all the metaphors and parables that he used. To value no knowledge any further than it is reducible to such a use would lead us into the loving of God. In this way, spiritual knowledge singularly promotes the love of God.
B. Promoting means. There are a variety of these. The several things I shall name for n-word means. Your way of managing must make them so.
1. Self-denial. This is so necessary. no other grace can supply the lack of it. It is among the graces of the soul as among the members of the body. One member may supply the need of another. The defect of the lungs may be supplied by other parts. The lack of prudence may be supplied with gospel simplicity, which looks like quite another thing. But nothing can supply our lack of love to God. nor can anything supply our lack of self-denial in order to our loving of God. We can never have thoughts of ourselves that are too low, provided we do not neglect our duty and let go of our hold on Christ. Those very things that not only we may love, but we must love, it is our duty to love them and our sin not to love them. Yet all these must be denied when they dare to stand in competition with our love to God. If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own wife also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26. Christ would have us count what religion will cost us before we meddle with it.
2. Contempt of the world. As love of the world is a great impediment, so contempt of the world is a great promoter of our love to God. May not our contempt of the world be best expressed by our worldly diffidence. We have no confidence in it, no expectation of happiness from it. I take both the understanding and will to be the seed of faith. And to have both of these against the world is to have our understanding satisfied that the world cannot satisfy us. To look upon the world as an empty drum that makes a great noise but has nothing in it, and therefore the will does not hanger after it and has no kindness for it. That person is a good, proficient, and divine love that can make the world serviceable to devotion by drawing arguments from his worldly condition, be it what it will, to promote piety. For example, have I anything considerable in the world? I will manage it as a steward. Blessed be God, for He has entrusted me with these things, whereby I may show my love to Him and my love to His people. Or, have I nothing in the world? Blessed be God for my freedom from worldly snares. God knows I need food and raiment, and I am of Jacob’s mind. If God will give me no more, He shall be my God, and I will be content. Genesis 28:20-21. Whatever my condition in the world may be it is better than Christ’s was and oh that I could love God as Christ did.
3. Observation of God’s benefits to us. It is goodness and beneficence that draws out love. God is our infinite benefactor. and the very brutes love their benefactors. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib. But Israel does not know, like people does not consider. Isaiah 1:3. Who can reckon up the benefits he receives from God? The most common of our mercy deserves a return of love. And how much more spiritual, or how much more our spiritual mercies Those very mercies that are troublesome to us also deserve our love. For example, trouble for sin, though to a degree of horror. Hungering after Christ, though unto languishing. Disappointments in the world, though without any satisfaction anywhere else. Lamenting after God, though with fear we shall never enjoy Him. Such like sorrows of anguish make way for spiritual joy and comfort, and the soul that goes through such exercises grows in love to God every day. As for other kinds of benefits, I’ll say but this. God does more for us every hour of our lives than all our dearest friends or relations on earth, than all the saints and angels in heaven can do. even if they should do their utmost. And can you do less than love him?
4. Watchfulness over our own hearts. When we love God, we are to remember that we love a jealous God. This will restrain the straggling of our affections. We should keep as careful a watch over our own hearts as we should over a rich heiress committed to our guardianship. If she is unworthily matched through our default, she is undone and we shall never be able to look God or man in the face. Christians, your hearts, through the condescension of God and the blood and spirit of Christ, are a match for the King of glory. but several inferior objects not worth the naming are playing earnest suitors. We are undone if any but God has our supreme love. If you are not severely watchful, this heart of yours will be stolen away. Therefore, be persuaded to examine everything that you have cause to suspect Call yourselves often to an account. Be jealous of your hearts and of everything whereby you may be endangered.
5. Prayer. All manner of prayer is singularly useful to inflame the heart with love to God. Those that pray best love God best. Mistake me not. I do not say those that can pray with the most florid expressions or those that can pray with the most general applause, but they that most feel every word they speak and every thought they think in prayer. Those whose apprehensions of God are most overwhelming, whose affections to God are most spiritually passionate, whose prayers are most wrestling and graciously impudent, This is the man that prays best and loves God best. I grant these are the prayers of a great proficient in the love of God. But you may pray for this frame when you cannot pray with it. The soul never falls sick of divine love and prayer, but Christ presently gives it an extraordinary visit. As soon as Christ’s spouse says she is sick with love, the next words she speaks are that his left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me. Song of Solomon 2:5-6. Compare that with those words. Turn away thine eyes from me for they have overcome me. Song of Solomon 6:5. Christ speaks as of being overcome and conquered. Therefore, rouse yourselves up and give yourselves unto prayer. Pray for a more spiritual discovery of God’s amiableness. If you knew God better, you could not help but love Him more. And none can reveal God to us as He reveals Himself, so spiritually and so powerfully. Accept no denial. God will never be angry with you for being importunate for a heart with which to love him. Oh my God, it is you yourself that I love above all things. It is you, Lord. In you my desires are terminated. And therefore, what will you give me if you will not give me yourself? Give me nothing. If I do not find you, I find nothing. You do not at all reward me, but vehemently torment me. Heretofore, when I sought you finally for yourself, I hoped that I should quickly find you and keep you, and with this sweet hope I comforted myself in all my labors. But now, if you deny me yourself, what will you give me? Shall I be forever disappointed of so great a hope? Shall I always languish in my love? Shall I mourn in my languishment? Shall I grieve in my mourning? Shall I weep and wail in my grief? Shall I always be empty? Shall I always disconsolately sorrow, incessantly complain, and be endlessly tormented? O my most good, most powerful, most merciful, and most loving God, Do not be so unfriendly and like an enemy to despise, refuse, wound, and torment those that love you with all their heart, soul, and strength, those that hope for full happiness in you. You are the God of truth, the beginning and end of those that love you. You do at last give yourself to those that love you to be their perfect and complete happiness. Therefore, O my most good God, grant that I may, in this present life, love you for yourself above all things, seek you in all things, and in the life to come, find you and hold you to eternity.
6. Meditation. This is a duty much talked of, yet little practiced. Did you but once a day, in that time of the day which upon experience you find to be fittest for such a work, solemnly place yourself in God’s presence. Beg of him the fixing and the flowing of your thoughts, that your thoughts might be graciously fixed, yet as graciously enlarged. Let the subject matter of them be something spiritual. endeavor to fill your heads and affect your hearts with holy musings until you came to some resolution which you closed upon with prayer and followed with endeavors. Oh, how would this engage your souls to love God? Though you cannot methodize the meditations of your mind, yet inure yourselves to a holy thoughtfulness about things above. Endeavor, as you are able, to tie your thoughts together and so fasten them that they may not be lost, that your musing time may not be reckoned among your lost time. I distinguish between meditation and study in this way. Study is for knowledge. Meditation is for grace. Study leaves everything as we find it, while meditation leaves a spiritual impression upon everything it meddles with. Is not meditation one of those duties of which the very constant performance speaks the soul to be gracious? Though I dare not say they that do not solemnly meditate every day are not gracious, yet I may say they are gracious that do. Try therefore whether you may not say with the psalmist, whilst I was musing, the fire burned. Psalm 39:3. whether while you are musing your heart may not be inflamed with love to God.
7. Choice of friends. I dare appeal to all experienced Christians whether they ever met with lively Christians that carried it like Christians without some warming of their hearts with love to God and godliness. The truth is Christian conference has the most speedy and effectual efficacy of any ordinance of God whatsoever. Do therefore in religion as you do in other things. For example, if you meet with a physician, all your discourse shall be something about your health. If you meet with a traveler, you are presently inquisitive about the places he is seen. Why should not Christians, when they meet, converse like Christians and presently fall into a heavenly dialogue? Christians, this you know. There must be a forsaking of all wicked company before you can pretend the least to love Christ. Mistake me not. I do not mean that the bonds of family relations must presently be broken. that husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and covenant servants must presently separate if one of them is ungodly? No. Where the relation is such as cannot be dissolved without sin, then those that are godly must converse with the ungodly as physicians with their sick patients. But this is it I say. You must not willingly and out of choice Make God’s enemies your familiar friends. Those that are always speaking well of God insensibly draw out our hearts in love to Him. When Christ’s spouse had told the daughters of Jerusalem what Christ was more than others, they presently offered themselves to seek Him with her. Song of Solomon 5:8 and 6:1. even as evil communication corrupts good manners. 1 Corinthians 15:33. So good communication corrects evil manners. In short, you cannot help but observe that none is able to hear anyone spoken against whom they love and that everyone delights to speak and hear of whom they love. So that here you must have a means to inflame and employ to exercise and a touchstone by which to try your love to God.
8. Thanksgiving. The person that makes a conscious habit of thanksgiving will thereby grow in love to God. He that takes everything kindly and thankfully from God cannot help but love him. Christians If we are not basely wanting to ourselves, we may by thankfulness make up or make everything a help to promote divine love. For instance, when I hear a man swear and curse and blaspheme God, I reflect, Oh, what cause have I to love God that he has not left me to do so? I am under the rebukes of God. I feel his anger in such a providence. Oh what cause have I to love God that he would take any pains with me and give me medicinal correction, not giving me up to my own hearts, lusts, until I perish. Alas, I am not so spiritual as to make such inferences. Yet blessed be God, I really value it as a privilege to be able to put a good interpretation on all God’s dealings. that I could love God for the very means and helps and encouragements to love him. I shall name no more, though I might many, promoting means, but,
C. Sustaining and conserving means. Here several braces are singularly useful. I shall name only three.
1. Faith. whereby we are persuaded that what God has spoken is true and good. If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. Mark 9:23. Now then, take some particular promise. Why not that which has already affected your heart? You can’t press a promise as you squeeze an orange to extract all that is in it. No. It is called drawing water out of a fountain. Isaiah 12:3. Though you draw out never so much, there is no less behind. Well then, take that promise. I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me. Proverbs 8:17. I may here, by my love to God, make out God’s love to me, and so by these claspings of love, have my love inflamed and preserved. But Christians, be sure to remember this. Whenever you lay one hand on a promise, lay the other on Christ. You will thereby get your objections answered and your fears removed. For example, John 6:37. I am unworthy of divine love, but so is not Christ. I know not how to come to God. Our access is by Christ. Though I come, I know not how to believe. Thy coming is believing. Oh, for more acquaintance with the life of faith, it is mostly with us in spirituals, according to our faith.
2. Hope, whereby we expect a future good. Hope is the daughter of faith, meaning a time the weak mother leans upon the daughter. Hope, at least to our apprehensions, has not so many obstructions and hindrances as faith. I dare say, I hope. What I dare not say, I believe. Though I must tell you, that which the over-modest Christian calls a weak hope, God often calls a strong faith. Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused me to hope. Psalm 119:49. That is a prayer of hope. And here is a promised answer to faith. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon me because he trusteth in thee. Isaiah 26:3. So that in a word as to the present case, though I yet cannot love God as I would, I hope God will help me that my love shall always be growing.
3. Patience. Let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.” James 1:4. Therefore go on in your work with patience, and no necessary grace shall be lacking unto you. See that you are patient in waiting and patient in bearing. Do not misinterpret God’s dealings with you. There are two passages I would have you take special notice of. The ground that brought such fruit as an answered expectation, Luke 8:15. It was an honest and good heart which kept the word and brought forth fruit with patience. The other is, in your patience possess your souls, Luke 21:19. Patience contributes much to both fruitfulness and comfort. If you would have God manifest his love to you in a more ravishing manner, stay a while. You lack another kind of dispensation first and foremost. Namely, to feel more of the evil of sin, that you may be more watchful and more holy. And as soon as a trial comes, if you would have it removed, instead stay a while. It has not done the work for which God sent it. God, in kindness, binds on the plaster until he has effected the cure. If you are at a loss and do not know what God will do with you, be it so. It is not fit for you to know. God does not usually tell his children beforehand what he will do with it, but expects that we should gather up our duty from the precepts of his word and from the hints of his providence. We read that when the prophet Elisha had given King Joash a promise and a sign of deliverance from Syria, God expected that his own reason in faith should prompt him so to improve a second sign, as to pursue the victory to a conquest. But he understood it not, and so miscarried. 2nd Kings 13:17-19. Learn to hold on in the use of all means for the engaging of your hearts more to God. We desire that every one of you do show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end, that you be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” Hebrews 6:11-12. Do not expect to obtain the promise until you have patiently endured. The same apostle in the same epistle tells us you have need of patience that after you have done the will of God you might receive the promise. Hebrews 10:36. Thus much for the inward means of loving God. L word means for engaging our hearts to love God are either directing or exemplary. First means. Directing. The only directing means is the word of God. But seeing, you shall in the following sermons have particular directions about both hearing and reading of the word. I shall only hint these few things.
1. Prize the Word. Though our estimation of it will be exceedingly heightened by a further acquaintance with it, yet you will find it singularly advantageous to the inflaming of your hearts to get your hearts graciously forestalled with the valuation of the Word. When we can count the word sweeter than honey to the taste, better than gold for a treasure, Psalm 19:10, more necessary than food for our sustenance, Job 23:12, how can the soul choose but to love the God whose love composed it? Shall filthy books provoke carnal love and shall not the book of God provoke divine love? Endeavor to get, but as spiritual, a sense and relish of divine truths, as is answerable to men’s carnal gusts and feeling of other things. Dwell upon these truths until they affect you. Only here observe this necessary caution. Dwell not so upon difficulties as to hinder your further inquiry into things more easily understood. but wait in a course of diligence and you will be able to master those difficulties which it is next to impossible suddenly to fathom. Do but steer an even course between a careless neglect and an anxious perplexity about what you read or hear. You will certainly attain a deep knowledge of the things of God and a high measure of love to God.
2. Set immediately upon the practice of those things which you shall be convinced to be your duty. Let not your affections cool upon any duty pressed upon you. Do something like that of Nebuchadnezzar when God revealed to him something of importance. He had lost the matter and understood not the meaning, but was, as others thought, unreasonably importunate to recover both. and that presently, before the impression wore off, and the heat went over.” Daniel 2:8-9. So, my brethren, fix the word by speedy practice, though the seed of the word is long and growing to perfection, yet it presently takes root in order to growth. Were I therefore now exhorting you to repentance, and could bring you to no nearer resolution than to repent tomorrow, my exhortation would be lost. So now, while I press you to love God and demonstrate from scripture that it is your duty, offer you scripture helps that may be effectual, provoke you with scripture encouragements that may be overcoming, if you now put off all this until a finer time, it is a thousand to one that you will put it off forever. Read this over again and then think, Why should I not now believe this? And how can I say I now believe it if I do not now put it into practice? And how can I say I practice it if I omit any one direction? Second means exemplary. Here I shall give you as short a touch as may be of men, angels, and Christ himself. We are much drawn by examples, for examples are not only arguments but wings. They give us a demonstration that precepts are practicable.
1. Men. Why should we not love God as well as Abraham did? God gives the word. Abraham, take now thy son, thy only son Isaac. whom thou lovest, and offer him up for a burnt offering.” And Abraham rose up early in the morning and went. Genesis 22:2-3. Had he not loved God as far as the creature can love God infinitely, every word would have been as a dagger to his heart. Abraham, I gave you that name from your being a father of many people. but now you will be the death of that seed which I intended to multiply.” God seemed to change his name to Abraham, father of many nations, even as Solomon named his son Rehoboam, an enlarger of the people, who enlarged them from twelve tribes to two. Take now, there is no time to linger upon it, thy son so many years prayed for and waited for. Thine only son, all the rest of your children are not worth owning. Isaac, the son of your laughter, now the son of your sorrow, whom thou lovest. More than ever a father loved a child, and that upon several justifiable accounts. And get thee into the land of Moriah, though no time to deliberate before you resolve to do it. yet time enough to change your mind before you execute upon your resolution. And offer him there for a burnt offering. It is not enough to give him up to be sacrificed by another, but you yourself must be the priest to kill your lovely child and then burn him to ashes. And Abraham rose up early and went. He does not quarrel with God. What does God mean by giving me such a command as never was given to anyone else in this world? He does not consult with his wife. Oh, what will Sarah say? He sticks not at what might expose religion. What will the heathen say? You may well suppose great strugglings between nature and grace, but God seemed to press upon him with this question. Do you love me? your child the most? Abraham seems to answer, Nay Lord, if that is the question it shall soon be decided how and when you please. We have another instance in Moses, if you will compare two or three scriptures. Moses at first inquires of God as we do of a stranger. What is your name? Exodus 3:13. Upon God’s further revealing of himself He begs more of his special presence, Exodus 33:15. And upon God’s granting of that, his love grows bold and he said, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. That’s:18. Once he found God to be favorably inclined, he begs that God would remove the cloud and show him as much of his glory as he was possibly able to bear the side of. Take one instance more, and that is of Paul, who, thinking God might have more glory by the saving of many than by the saving only of him, was willing to quit the happiness of salvation. Romans 9:3. His love to God is greater than his love to himself, and so he reckons himself happy without glory, provided God may be more glorified. And thus I have produced three examples, one before the law, one under the law, and one under the gospel. How will you receive it if I shall venture to say that we have, in some respect, more cause to love God than any and all these persons put together? What singular gleams of warm love from God they had more than we? are in some respects exceeded by the noonday light and heat of gospel love that we have more than they. What love visits God was pleased to give them are exceeded by Christ’s extraordinary presence among us. What was to them a banquet is to us our daily bread. God opens the windows of heaven to us. God opens his very heart to us. We may read more of the love of God to us in one day than they could in their whole lives.
2. Angels that unweariedly behold the face of God. They refuse nothing that may evidence their love to God. It is ordinarily the devil’s work to be the executioners of God’s wrath. It is said He cast upon them the fierceness of His anger, wrath, and indignation and trouble by sending evil angels among them. Psalm 78:49. But the good angels will not stick at it when God requires it. The angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred eighty-five thousand. Second Kings 19:35. But now we have more cause to love God than the angels. God has expressed greater love to us in Christ than he has to them. He took no hold of angels. Hebrews 2:16. Not any one of them received so much as the pardon of any one sin. God would not bear with them in so much as the least tittle. As soon as they ceased to love God with a perfect love, God hated them with a perfect hatred. And for the blessed angels, are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation? Hebrews 1:14. Yet none of the saints are to minister to the angels in anything. How should we love such a master? but I have a pattern to commend to you above the angels.
3. Christ. Oh that the mention of Christ’s love to his father might transport us. Though Christ did nothing but what pleased his father. John 8:29. Christ suffered everything that might please him. Philippians 2:8. Christ obeyed every command, endured every threatening, that it was possible to endure, and that to the intensive extent of them. Yet God dealt more harshly with Christ than He ever did with any of us. It pleased the Father to bruise Him and to put Him to grief, Isaiah 53:10. Whereas the church, in the midst of her lamentations, must acknowledge, He doth not afflict willingly. nor grieve the children of men.” Lamentation 3:33. Yet Christ prayed that the world may know that thou hast loved them as thou hast loved me. John 17:23. Therefore should we not then pray and strive to love God as near as it is possible as Christ loved him Christ had not one hard thought of God’s severe justice. No, not when he endured what was equivalent to the eternal torments of the damned. And shall our love shrink at God’s fatherly chastisements? Christ’s love to God did not abate while God poured out His wrath. And shall ours abate under medicinal providences? Whatever our outward condition is in this world, it is better than Christ’s. Thus I have endeavored to acquaint you with what abilities are requisite and how to attain them that you may love God.
4. How to improve and augment all our possible abilities to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. For this I shall give you one general yet singular direction, though I must inform, direct, and press several things under it. And that is, set yourselves to love God. Set upon it as you are able. Do for the engaging of your love to God as you would do for engaging your hearts in love to a person commended to you for marriage. Here is a person commended to you which you never saw nor heard of before. All the report you can hear speaks a great suitableness in the person and consequently happiness in the match. You thereupon entertain the motion and a treaty to see whether reports are true and affections feasible. Though at first you find no attraction on either side, Yet if you meet with no discouragements, you continue conversing until, by a more intimate acquaintance, there arises a more endearing affection. At length, such love quickly becomes mutual. Do something like this in your spiritual life. I now solemnly bespeak your highest love for God. Perhaps God and your soul are still strangers. You have not yet met with him in his ordinances, nor savingly heard of him by his spirit. Don’t slight the overture, for from your first entertainment of it, you will be infinitely happy. Everything in religion is at first uncouth. The work of mortification is harsh, and the work of holiness difficult. but practice will facilitate them and make you in love with them. And so the more you acquaint yourself with God, the more you cannot help but love Him, especially considering that God is as importunate with you for your love as if His own happiness was concerned, or as He is infinitely above receiving benefit from us. But seeing He is so earnest with you for your love, Beg it of Him, for Him. God is more willing to give every grace than you can be to receive it. Acquaint thyself therefore with God, and thou shalt have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God. Thou shalt make thy prayer unto Him, and He shall hear thee. Job 22:21, 26-27. What matter is it, though you begin at the lowest step of divine love? You may, through grace, mount up to the highest pinnacle. I willingly waive so much as mentioning the several methods proposed, and shall from a modern author commend to you these five steps or degrees of love to God.
The First Degree
The first degree is to love God for those good things which we do or hope to receive from Him. To love God as our benefactor. O love the Lord, all ye saints, for the Lord preserveth the faithful. Psalm 31:23. Though I name this as the lowest degree of our loving of God, yet the highest degree of our loving God is never separated from the loving of God as our benefactor. It is mentioned in Moses’ commendation that he esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he had respect under the recompense of reward. Hebrews 11:26. To love God for hopes of heaven is not a mercenary kind of love. It is not only lawful that we may, but it is our duty that we must love God for the glory that is laid up for us. Where is the man that will own the name of Christian, who dares to charge Christ with any defect of love to God, while the Scriptures say expressly that, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame and is set down on the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:2. Is it not an infinite kindness of God to make promises? And is it not grossly absurd to say it is a sin to believe them? When our love shall be perfected in heaven, shall we then love God? And shall we not then love God as well for our perfect freedom from sin, for our perfection of grace, for the society of saints and angels, as well as for himself? If you question this, surely you will startle more at what I shall further assert. To love God for temporal benefits does infallibly evidence us eminently spiritual. Nay, further yet, I shall commend to the consideration of the most considerate Christian whether our loving of God for the good things of this life does not evidence a greater measure of love to God than to love God only for the gracious communication of Himself unto the soul. I speak of truly loving God, not of merely saying you love Him. Now I evidence it thus. God’s gracious communications of Himself naturally tend to the engaging of the soul to love Him. But the things of the world do not do so. God’s gracious communication of Himself speaks special love on God’s part, and that draws out love again. But alas, common mercies speak no such thing. That soul that is so graciously ingenuous as to love God for those lower kinds of mercies that do not of themselves speak any love from God to us, that love of God looks something like, though it is infinitely short of it, for it is impossible to prevent God in his loving of us, but it looks somewhat like our being beforehand with God in this way of special love. To love God spiritually for temporal mercies, how excellent is this love, though to love a benefactor may be but the love of a brute. Yet to love God thus as our benefactor cannot be anything but the love of a saint. You see, therefore, that though you begin your love to God below what is rational, it may insensibly grow up to what is a little less than angelical. Second degree. The second step of our love to God is to love God for himself because he is the most excellent good. You may abstract the consideration of his beneficence to us from his excellency in himself. Then the soul can rise thus, Lord I Though I should never quite have a smile from thee while I live and should be cast off by thee when I die, yet I love thee. Alas, why is this named as the second step? Surely there are but few that can rise so high. Pray, Christians, mind this. There is many a gracious soul that loves God for himself. who dare scarce own it that he loves God at all. For instance, when the soul is in perplexing darkness and cannot discern any covenant interest in God, but as the church bemoans herself, God hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood. My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord. When I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayers.” Lamentations 3:8, 15, and 18. In short, it is the case of every soul that is under sore temptations or long desertions. Yet mark you, while they thus walk in darkness and see no light, yet then a discerning Christian may see his love to God, like Moses’ face, which shines to others’ observations, though not to his own, as may be particularly thus evidenced when God smites them. Yet they love him, for they are still searching what sin it is that he contends for, that they may get rid of it, not hide it nor excuse it. When they fear God will damn them, then they love him. for they then keep in the way of holiness, which is the way of salvation. Yea, they will not be drawn out of it, though carnal friends like Job’s wife bid them curse God and die. Though Satan tells them they strive in vain, though their discouragements are multiplied, and their diligence is disappointed, yet they are resolved like Job who said, though God hath taken away my judgment, and the Almighty hath vexed my soul, I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.” Job 27:2, 5, 6, and 10. In other words, I will delight in the Almighty or nothing. I will always call upon God, though he should never regard me.” Though the soul under trouble will not own so much goodness in itself as to say thus, yet the conversation of such Christians speaks it plainly. And can such a frame proceed from anything but love to God? Does not grace work in the soul like physic in the body? The mother gives her child physic. The physic, in its working, makes the child sick. The child, when sick, instead of being angry with the mother for the physic, makes all its moan to the mother, hangs about her, lays its head in her bosom. Is this not love to the mother, though she gave this sick physic? My brethren, God deals with his children in the same way. Though some of his dealings make them heartsick, yet they cling to him, fearing nothing but sin and bearing anything but his displeasure. Is this not love? And don’t these love God for himself? It is true, God’s love to them all this while is great, but they perceive it not. The third degree. The third step is to love nothing but for God’s sake, in Him, for Him, and to Him. This is said to be Teresa’s maxim. All that is not God is nothing. Instead, or indeed, The very word that Solomon uses for vanity, which he endorses upon the best of creature happiness in the very notion of it, proclaims it. It is not God, therefore it is vanity. It is a noble employment to try experiments upon every loving object and reduce our love of them to the love of God. to be still musing upon spiritual cases, still supplying of spiritual needs, still longing for spiritual enjoyments, that I may not only love other things in subordination to God, but to love nothing but for God. For example, in all our enjoyments, have I an estate, I will honor God with my substance because I love Him. Have I anything pleasant or delightful in this world? I will run it up to the fountain. Oh, how pure and satisfying are the loving soul’s delights in God. Have I any esteem in the world? I am no way fond of it, but so far as it may make my attempts for the honor of God more successful, I will improve it and, upon all other accounts, decline it. nearer yet. My relations are dear unto me. I truly love them, but yet my love to God shall animate my love to them. I truly love my friend, but this shall be my love’s exercise, to persuade him to love God. I dearly love my parents, but, oh, there is no father like God. my soul is overcome with that expression of Christ’s. Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same as my brother and sister and mother.” Matthew 12:50. My conjugal relation is dearest to me, yet my heart is passionately set upon this, that we may both be infallibly espoused unto Christ. My heart yearns toward my children, but I would rather have them God’s children than mine. Nearer yet as to inward qualifications, for example, for natural parts. I bless God that I am not an idiot, that I have any capacity of understanding. But I am resolved to the utmost of my capacity to endeavor the convincing of all that I converse with, that to love and enjoy God is most highly rational and most eminently our interest. Have I any acquired endowments of learning or wisdom? I bless God for them, but I count all wisdom folly. and all learning dotage without the knowledge of God in Christ. If any man thinks that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. But if any man loves God, the same is known of him.” 1 Corinthians 8:2-3. Higher yet for gracious qualifications that capacitate me for glory. I love grace the best of any creature, wherever I see it, but it is for the sake of the God of all grace, without whom my grace is inconsiderable. Once more, higher yet, and higher than this, I think we cannot go. To love those things that are lovely, merely for God’s sake, or out of love to God. For instance, How many of you heard complain of lack of affections or sorry lack of afflictions for fear that God does not love them? Though by the way those betray their weakness who thus complain or did they but observe their lack of eminence of divine love and did they more sympathize with the Church of Christ under the cross they would find they need not complain for lack of afflictions. But, be it so, complain they do, and that for lack of afflictions. Afflictions are no way lovely. We are nowhere bid to pray for them, but it is our duty to pray for preventing and removing them. And yet the gracious soul is, at least in some respect, in love with them because of its love to God. Here is a notable degree of divine love. that the soul would experience the love of God upon any terms and engage the heart in love to God again and to love nothing but for God. The fourth degree. The fourth step of our love to God is for our highest love of everything to be hatred in comparison to our love to God. The truth is we can never so plainly know to what a degree we love God as by weighing it against whatever stands in competition with it. Why should I so far debase my love to God as to weigh it in the same balance with love to sin? But alas, why do besotted sinners so dote upon sin as if love for God were not worthy to be compared with it? Methinks I may a little more than allude to that passage of Isaiah. They lavish gold out of the bag and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith, and he maketh it a god. Isaiah 46:6. They give out their gold by handfuls without weighing for matter of their idols, but they will be good husbands in their expenses about the workmanship of them. Man cares not at what rate he loves his idols, those lusts upon which they bestow their affections due to God alone, though in all other things they are wary enough. But why should I waste time in speaking to these? They have not yet gone one step towards the love of God, and therefore are so far behind that they are not within learning of what is spoken to good proficience in the love of God. Let me only leave with them this parting word from a person’s first sincere and ardent love to God. You can neither speak nor think of sin without abhorrency. From the first infusion of grace, there is a graciously natural antipathy against sin. Sin receives its death wound. It is too true that if it may struggle for life and seem to be upon recovery, but grace will mar it out and will never leave the conflict until it has obtained the conquest. But this is not the thing I intended to speak to in this particular. It is things of another kind than sin that the soul which loves God is afraid to spill his love upon. He prizes those ordinances wherein he meets in communion with God, but is afraid his love should terminate there. He values them only as windows to let in the light. Though something excellent may be written there, yet it is neither the writing nor the window which is prized, but the light. When that is gone, shut up the window as if it were a dead wall that is no more regarded until the light returns. It is the light of God’s countenance that is better than life itself. Perhaps you will say this comes not up to what I asserted, that our highest love to everything is to be hatred in comparison of our love to God. Well, let this be warily considered. One whose love to God is at this height is exactly scrupulous in the management of his And while he is so, he is carefully jealous, lest grace should warp to rob God of his glory. He loves inherent grace heartily. Oh, says he, that my soul were more enriched with it. Yet while he is breathing after perfection in grace, he admiringly prefers God’s wise love in saving him by Christ before salvation by inherent grace. He utterly renounces the best of his graces when pride would have them jostle with Christ for the procuring of acceptation by merit. In short, a soul that is overcome with God’s method of salvation is unable to bear anything that darkens it. Would God have me to be as watchful against sin as if there were no Christ to pardon it? My little children, these things I write unto you.
1. Our first care must be not to sin. Oh, that I could perfectly comply with God in this, but alas, I cannot. Would God have me to rest as entirely upon Christ after my utmost attainments, as that wretch who pretends to venture his soul upon him after an ill-spent life? O Lord, I trust no more to my good work than he can to his bad ones for his meriting of salvation. As I would not ungratefully overlook anything the Spirit has done in me, so I would not have anything which I have almost marred in the Spirit’s doing of it, to draw a curtain whereby Christ should be less looked on.
Fifth Degree
The most eminent degree of our love to God is ecstasy and ravishment. We need not go down to the legends of the Philistines to sharpen our incentives to the love of God. I could overmatch what can be said with truth of Ignatius and Severus with several whom many of you knew whose unparalleled humility hid them from observation and whose communion with God was often overwhelming. But I forbear. Take an example from Scripture of this kind of love by comparing but three passages in the Song of Songs.
1. I am sick of love.
2. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that yon tell him that I am sick of love.” Song of Solomon 5:8. This charge is from her spiritual languishment, though or through earnest desire of reconciliation after some negligence and carelessness in duty.
3. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave. The coals thereof are coals of fire, which have a most vehement flame.” Song of Solomon 8:6. This is when she had the highest communion with God that an imperfect state affords. When she was, as it were, upon the threshold of glory, and then she says,
Love is strong as death, or I shall die unless you grant my desire, or let me die that my desire may be granted. Jealousy is as cruel as the grave, as the grave is never satisfied, so neither will my love without the utmost enjoyments of yourself. The coals thereof are coals of fire, which have a most vehement heat. My love burns up my corruptions, shines in holiness, and mounts upwards in heavenly-mindedness. Many waters cannot quench it. The waters of afflictions are but as oil to the fire.
If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly condemned. She scorns all things that would force or flatter her out of her love to Christ. Now if you object against this as spoken of love to Christ and not of love to God, essentially to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I readily answer, we cannot see God lovely but in Christ. If any will be so careful as to assert that they look upon Christ himself as but a means to bring them to God, it is God essentially, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. when Christ shall have given up his mediatory kingdom.” 1 Corinthians 15:28. That must be their complete happiness.
The means is not to be rested in in comparison of the end. This may well be compared to a sea of glass. Revelation 15:2-3. Slippery standing. Oh that I could but discover what my soul should long for. namely, how to look beyond Christ to God, in whom alone is my complete happiness, and then to look, in some respect, beyond God to Christ, to give the Lamb his peculiar honor, when I shall be with the Almighty, and with the Lamb as in a temple. the glory of God and the Lamb shall be the light whereby I shall see that God who dwells in such light as no mortal eye can behold.” Revelation 21:22-23 and 1st Timothy 6:16. That will be a blessed vision indeed when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away.” 1 Corinthians 13:10.
We have yet but childish apprehensions of these things, to what we shall have when we come to a perfect man under the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Ephesians 4:13. Now we see darkly through the glass of ordinances, but then we shall see face to face Now, we know but in part, but then we shall know God, according to our measure, as God knows us. And then the greatest grace will be love, perfect love, that will cast out all fear, fear of not attaining, and fear of losing that joy of our Lord into which we are taken. But alas! All I can say in this matter is rather the restless fluttering of the soul towards God than the quiet resting of the soul in God. Let me close the paragraph with that rapture of profound, Brad Wardine.
Oh Lord my God, you are the good of every good, good above all good things, a good most infinitely infinite. How therefore, therefore should I love you? How shall I proportionately love you infinitely? All that I could. But how can I, that I’m so very little and finite, love you infinitely? And how otherwise will there be any proportion between your loveliness and my love? My God, you are super amiable. You infinitely exceed all other things that are lovely. Perhaps, Lord, I should love you infinitely as to the manner, when I cannot as to the act. It pertains to the manner of loving to love you finally for yourself, and no other good finally for itself. But for you, who are the chiefest good, the beginning and end of all good things. But perhaps I may in some sort love you infinitely as to the act, both intensively and extensively. Intensively, in loving you more intensely, more firmly, more strongly than any finite good, and when I love nothing but for your sake. And then extensively, when I compare you, Lord, with all other great and good things, and had rather that they and myself also had no being than to offend my good God even once. But yet, most loving Lord, when I consider a proportion of love, I am greatly troubled. If love should be according to the worth of the object, by how much you are better than I am, and more profitable to me than I am to myself. I should love you more than you love me, but that I never can. O Lord, I beseech you, how much do you love me? Is it weakly and remissly, according to my goodness? That is far from you, Lord. for you love yours incomparably more than you are loved by them, even as you are incomparably greater and better than they. But, O great and good God that fills heaven and earth, yea, the heaven of heavens cannot contain you. Why do you not fill my poor little soul? O my soul, why do you not open all your little doors? Why do you not extend your utmost capacity that you may be wholly possessed, wholly satiated, wholly inebriated with the sweetness of such great love? Especially when, though you are so little, yet you cannot be satisfied with the love of any lesser good. Many questions might be proposed to expostulate my soul into a flame of love. But I see, Lord, that it is easy to speak and write these things, but hard to do and perfect them in effect. Therefore, most good and almighty Lord, to whom nothing is difficult, grant I pray Thee that I may more easily do these things with my heart than profess them with my mouth. And thus, having after my poor manner put you upon practice and pointed you the way from the lowest to the highest step of divine love, I am sensible that both good and bad have their exceptions ready against what I have delivered.
The humble, trembling Christian, he fears that if the lowest degree of love to God has such heights in it, he shall never be able to reach it, and he whom God would not have made sad is grieved. On the other hand, those that call themselves Christians, though there’s no reason for their usurping that title without any consideration of either the duty or themselves, will insist that they love God with all their hearts, souls, and minds, and that they have always done so, and that those that do not love God are unworthy to live. Yet if you inquire into any particulars whatsoever about their love to God, they will rather quarrel with you than give you any satisfying answer. If I could therefore propose anything that would apply itself, in other words, by its own evidence, work itself into the conscience, I might hope to dissolve their self-flatteries I cannot at present think of a more compendious way of undeceiving both these and of further persuasively urging the love of God than by plainly naming the infallible properties and constant effects of this love. By this, those that despondingly fear they lack it will find they have it. and those that groundlessly boast of it will find that they lack it, and both will be instructed in what must be done to evidence and exert it. I shall begin with the properties of our love to God, and here, as in all the rest, I must study contraction. and therefore dare not particularly mention Gerson’s 50 properties of divine love. I shall rather follow Votius’ method, who ranks the properties of divine love thus.
A. Partly negative and primitive.
B. partly positive and absolute.
C. Partly comparative and transcendent. I shall speak briefly of each of these. Your consciences may manage it as if it were a use of examination.
A. Negative properties or adjuncts are such as these, and these may prevent the mistakes of drooping Christians. Alas, a great part of Christ’s church and family are such upon one account or other.
1. This divine love is not at all found in the unregenerate, unless only in show and imitation. The soul that is solicitous about loving God, that soul loves Him. This is proper and peculiar to all those, and only those, that are born of God, those that are the adopted children of God. Let it be considered whether the devil can counterfeit love to God as he can other graces. Their faith works by fear and not by love. The devils believe and tremble. James 2:19. It is true. He does not only permit but promote a hypocritical divine love in some. He may appear in a love mask to others as to Adam in paradise. God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods. Genesis 3:5. He pretends he has more kindness both for them than God himself and the like to Christ. Matthew 4:3. But did he himself ever pretend so much as to love God? I grant that wicked men pretend to love God, but the ridiculousness of their discourse plainly evidences that they neither understand what they say or affirm. And whereas you complain that you fear your love is not sincere because it is selfish, do not be discouraged. While you study to please God, fear to offend Him, Prize his presence and mourn for his absence. Your love to God is infallibly sincere, even though there is an ingredient of self in it. Nay, let me say more, it could not be sincere if you did not mind yourself. In the very quintessence of conjugal love, it is impossible to abstract it from self-love. The more we love God, the more we cannot help but love ourselves. Yea, even then, when we most deny ourselves out of love to God.
2. This divine love is far from perfection. It is subject to more sensible languishments and infirmities than any other grace, though it can never be totally and finally extinguished. Sometimes to your own apprehension you cannot tell whether you love God at all. At other times you may complain of fickleness and inconstancy. The time of this fear may even be longer than the time you feel of your love. Yet while your heart can say it is unquiet in this temper and it is your restless desire to love God more perfectly, these very complaints speak love. We never complain of lack of love to those persons whom we do not already love. This, as well as other graces, is here but in part. 1 Corinthians 13:10. While we are in this lower world, our very graces will have their need as well as their spring tides. We cannot be so wise as to foresee all our hindrances, nor so watchful as to avoid all of Satan’s ambushes. nor so perfect as to maintain a spiritual frame of heart. Though this grace is always in motion, yet it does not always more equally go forward.
3. Our love to God shall never be abolished. Love never faileth. 1st Corinthians 13:8. The same kind of love The same absolute love that was in gracious persons on earth shall be continued in heaven, and shall receive its perfection immediately after its delivery from the body of death. There will be a greater change in all our graces than in our love. A great part of our life is taken up in the exercise of those graces that, I may in some respect say, die with us. Half our life is, or should be, spent in mortification, while all of our time needs the exercise of our patience. Our life, at best, is but a life of faith. Much of our sweet communion with God is fetched in by secret prayer. But in heaven there shall be no sin to be mortified, nothing grievous to be endured. Faith shall be swallowed up in enjoyment. and your petitions shall be all answered. Therefore, Christians, set yourselves to love in God, and you shall in no way lose your labor. Other graces are but as physic to the soul, desirable for something else, which, when obtained, renders them useless. But love to God is the healthful constitution of the soul. There is never any part of it in any sense which is useless. Most of the graces of the Spirit are to our souls as our friends are to our bodies. They accompany them to the grave and part with them there. But love to God is the only grace that is to our souls the same that a good conscience is, our best friend in both worlds. This divine love is so unknown to the world that when they behold the effects and flames of it in those that love God in an extraordinary manner, they’re ready to explode it as more vanity or mere vanity, folly, madness, ostentation, and hypocrisy. When Paul managed his audience more like a sermon than a defense, Festus cries out upon him as mad, Acts 26:24.
A. Yea, when Christ himself in his love for God and the souls of men is more hungry for converts than food. His nearest relations think him crazy. And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him, for they said, He is beside himself. Mark 3:20 through 21. But were they any other but his carnal and graceless relations that did this? Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. It’s:32. It is no marvel then that enemies reproach you, friends forsake you, relations slight you, and the world hates you. 1 John 3:13. Christ tells us, if the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. John 15:18. But how can the world hate Christ, who in love to it came to die for it? Christ tells his hearers the true reason. I know you. This is no groundless surmise nor censorious rashness. But I know you. That ye have not the love of God in you. John 5:42. Let what will appear at the top lie at the bottom also. And therefore judge, I pray you, who is more fanatical. those that hate God when they pretend to love Him, or those that are counted frantic for their serious love for God. I shall neither name more nor enlarge further upon this first rank of characters, but be brief also in the second,
B. The absolute properties of love to God are, among many, some of them, such as these. It is the most ingenious of all graces. In poor, inconsiderable loves not worth the mentioning. How do persons contrive ways for the expressing and exciting of love? There is no way to prevent it. Oh, how much more this is so when the soul loves God. There is nothing that improves the parts like grace. Divine love makes the best improvement of wit parts, and time. When a person loves to pray, though he can scarcely speak sense to men, he can strenuously plead with God. A person that loves to meditate, though he knows not how to make his thoughts hang together in other things, yet they multiply on his hand with a spiritual and profitable consistency. In short, what gracious stratagems does love abound with? to do anything that may engage the heart to God. That as he that beholds his face in a mirror, it makes the face which he sees. His very look is the pencil, color, the art. So he that loves God sees such a reflection of God’s love to him. That a proud person does not more please herself in her own fancy beauty than this gracious soul is graciously delighted in the mutual dartings of divine love, in the things of God, keep from will-worship and humanistic inventions, especially from imposing upon others your prudentials of devotion. Then I will commend it to you to try all the experiments which the scripture will warrant to increase the flame of your divine love.” Love to God is the most bold, strong, constant, and daring grace of all the graces of the Spirit of God. Love is strong as death. Song of Solomon 8:6. Everyone knows what work death makes in the world. It is not the power of potentates, nor the reverence of age, nor the usefulness of grace, that can prevent its stroke. It conquers all. So does love for God. Nothing can stand before it. What dare will love for God not attempt? It designs impossibilities, namely perfection, and is restless for the lack of it. In some sense, I may say it would fain have contradictions true. Namely to be without the body while in it. The body being a clog is so wearisome. Love to God not only baffles Satan, but through God’s gracious condescension it even prevails with God himself. That God will deny nothing to the soul that loves him.
3. Love to God is the only self-emptying and satisfying grace. love is the self’s egress. It is a kind of pilgrimage from self. He that loves is absent from himself, thinks not of himself, provides not for himself. And oh, how great is the gain of renouncing ourselves and thereby receiving God and ourselves. We are, as it were, dead to ourselves and alive to God. Nay, more, by love we live in God. God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 1 John 4:16. By faith we live upon God, by obedience we live to God, but by love we live in God. It is herein alone that we can give something like a carnal, though it is indeed a highly spiritual, answer to Nicodemus’s question. How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born? John 3:4. We have our souls immediately from the father of spirits. By regeneration we return to God again, from whom by sin we were estranged, and by love we live in him, in some little resemblance to the child’s living in the mother’s womb. What the mother loves, the child loves. What the mother longs for, the child longs for. In the mother’s health, the child is well. The child lives there in a far different manner from how it lives in the world. Though it cannot stir out of its enclosure, yet it never cries nor complains of its imprisonment. So the soul that entirely loves God hates what God hates and loves what God loves. Its life is far above the life of others, and it desires no greater liberty than to be, as it were, imprisoned in God, to have no will of its own, no one motion but what God graciously concurs in. Yet it is so far from esteeming this restraint that it counts it the highest happiness of its imperfect state. He feels the sweetness in that beyond what the heathen that said it ever thought of. In God we live, move, and have our being. Acts 17:28.
4. The love of God makes us anxiously weary of life itself. In this love there is one death and two resurrections. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Galatians 2:20. Christ lives and the soul lives, and both by love. I must acknowledge that all manner of love is apt to be extravagant and irregular. Our very love to God is in this blind when it comes to any considerable height. It is apt to overlook, not in a way of neglect, but ecstasy. what is to be done and suffered, and would fain be at the enjoyment of God in heaven. By the way, let not doubting Christians be discouraged, because it is not thus with them. Though these properties may be but in the bud, they may in time become full-grown. Therefore, believe and wait. Heights of grace are ordinarily the work of time as well as of the Spirit of God. Besides, you know that there is nothing more common than for lovers to disguise their love. And so here, it is too common for gracious persons to misrepresent the Spirit of God than to thankfully own their love to God, because they are afraid of being mistaken. They are afraid of boasting of a false gift. And here the love, when it is perfect, casts out fear. Yet while it is imperfect, fear proves our love.
C. So much for the positive properties. I will be very brief in the transcendent properties of our love to God.
1. Love to God is the great general directing grace containing all other particular graces in it. and most intimately goes through the acts of all of them. 1 Corinthians 13. Love in the soul is as the pilot of the ship who steers the ship and all its passengers. Love steers the soul and all its operations. Love is the needle in the compass that is always turning toward its divine lodestone. Eusebius compares other graces to uncoined bullion, which, though it has an intrinsic value, yet it is not that money which answers all things. What shall I say? Find out a thousand transcendent metaphors. Love will answer them all.
2. It is in a singular manner infinite. Among all the faculties of the soul, there is none but the will that can, in any sound sense, be said to be infinite. All the other faculties are more bounded than the will. Now love is the natural act of the will. Love to God is the supernaturally natural act of the renewed will. It desires to be united unto God, the fountain of all blessedness. And those that love God least, though sincerely, their desires are infinite. Desires are the feet of the soul. Their love will crawl when it cannot walk. Desires are the wings of the soul. Love will flutter when it cannot fly. Desires are the breathings of the soul. Love will pant, groan, and gasp where it can do no more. Again, the contentment and satisfaction of the will, which is the love of contented self-satisfaction, is infinite in as large a sense as that word can be ascribed to creatures. Desires are the motion and exercise of love. Delight is the quiet and repose of it. My beloved, to have the heart delight in God or to ache and tingle with the discourse of the love of God through reflection upon the lack of it as if unable to stand under its own thoughts or his own thoughts. This infallibly shows great love and this soul’s satisfaction in God is in some sort infinite. And now for a word on the effects of love to God. They relate to God himself, to ourselves, or they are mutual. I will speak briefly of each.
1. Effects that relate to God are such as these, but are not limited to these.
A. Hatred of and flight from all that is evil. Joseph may be our instance. His mistress would have unveiled him into sin, but though she spake to him day by day, yet he hearkened not unto her to lie by her or to be with her. Genesis 39:10. He fears that sin will get as far as he can out of the reach of a temptation. Hatred of sin always holds proportion with our love to God. Our inward hatred of sin with our inward love of God. Our return to sin with the decay of our love to God. The renewing of our repentance answers the reviving of our love to God. Everyone that does not love God loves sin. Plain, downright sin. sin without any excuse, either some moral wickedness or arresting in their own righteousness.
B, the fear of God. A reverential tenderness of conscience lest we sin against God. It is not only fear of hell but fear of God’s goodness. They shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days. Hosea 3:5. The soul that loves God is troubled that he either does or omits anything for fear of hell and that he is no more affected with love arguments. However, pray take notice, by the way, that all fear of hell does not presently argue a spirit of bondage. Hopes and fears poise the soul while in this world. I would therefore leave this charge upon you, to be sure that you love God better than the blessed apostle loved him, before you censure any for lack of love who are diligent in duty upon this motive, lest they be at last cast away.” 1 Corinthians 9:27. But to return Though God’s gracious condescension may be so great as to allow those that love him an unparalleled familiarity, yet that never breeds the least contempt. Sense of distance between God and the soul, between the holy God and a sinful soul, between the faithful God and the fickle soul, This causes holy tremblings and humble apologies in our most familiar pleadings with God. The father of the faithful, whom God honored with the title of friend when he pleaded with Christ face to face, and so familiar a way, see how he then prefaced his prayer. Behold now I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord. which am but dust and ashes.” Genesis 18:27. And again, Oh let not the Lord be angry and I will speak.:30. God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints and to be had in reverence of all them that are about him. Psalm 89:7. Methinks that that passage of Christ to his disciples, with the circumstance of time when he spoke it, just upon the most servile action of his life, may forever keep an awe upon our hearts. Know ye what I have done to you. Ye, that is all of you, ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am. John 13:12-13. When God deals most familiarly with us as with friends, let us carry it reverently as his becoming of servants.
C. Obedience to the commands of God and to those commands which would never be obeyed except out of love to God. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not grievous.” 1 John 5:3. That is, to obey those commands that are unpleasing and troublesome, those commands that thwart our carnal reason and so part with things present, for the hopes of that which we have never seen, nor any man living that has told us of them. Whoso keepeth his word in him verily is the love of God perfected. Hereby know we that we are in him. 1 John 2:5. Once more hear what Christ said. He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me. and he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.” John 14:21. And again, if a man love me, he will keep my words, and my father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him. That’s:23.
D. Resignation of ourselves to God, whereby we devote ourselves wholly to God, to be wholly His, to be in every way disposed of as He pleases. The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that if one died for all, then we’re all dead. that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them.” 2nd Corinthians 5:14-15. This resignation is like that in the conjugal relation. It debars so much as treating with any other. It proclaims, as it were, irreconcilable hatred to any that would partake of any such love. God does not deal with us as with slaves but takes us into that relation which speaks most delight and happiness and we are never more our own than when we are most absolutely His.
E. Adhesion, and cleaving unto God in every case and in every condition. In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice, my soul followeth hard after thee. Psalm 63:7-8. Methinks we may say of the law concerning birds, Deuteronomy 22:6, what the apostle says of the law concerning oxen. Does God take care for his birds? For our sakes, no doubt, it is written to instruct us against cruelty. But may we not learn a further lesson? The bird was safe while on her nest, and our only safety is with God. Now cleave to God in all conditions, not only when we fly to him as our only refuge and our pressures, but also in our highest prosperity and outward happiness when we have many things to rely on which the world expects divine happiness in. This is a fruit of great and humble love for it demonstrates an undervaluing of the world and a voluntary choosing of God. This is somewhat like heavenly love.
F. Tears and sighs through desires and joys. This is observed when the spiritual lovesick soul would in some inexpressible manner breathe out its sorrows and joys into the bosom of God. Lord, why are you thus loving to me and yet my heart no more overcome with divine love? Those that never reached as much from you love you more. Oh, I am weary of my lack of love. Oh, I am weary of my distance from God. Oh, I am weary of my unspiritual frame. We that are in this tabernacle do groan being burdened. Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. 2 Corinthians 5:4. Here, when the heart is ready to die away through excess of love, it is passionately complaining of its defects. Dear Lord, what shall I say? What shall I do? What shall I render? all for more endearing communications of divine love, all for more unanswerable returns of love to God. This much of effects as to God. 2. Effects that relate to us. The only effect I shall name, as this pertains to us, is the seeking of heaven and things above with contempt of the world and all worldly excellencies. One that loves God thinks he can never do enough in heavenly employments. A person that abounds in love to God is too apt to neglect secondary duties which are in their places necessary. they are apt to jostle out one duty with another. For example, those duties wherein they have most sensible communion with God bear down lesser duties before them, whereas could we keep within the bounds of Scripture and mind every duty according to its significance, then this is an excellent effect of divine love. For instance, To be afraid of worldly enjoyments, lest they should steal the heart from God. Yet at the same time do not dare to omit any worldly duty, lest I should prove partial in the work of Christianity. To make conscience of the least duties, because no sin is little. But to be proportionably careful of the greatest duties, lest I should prove to be a hypocrite Such a carriage is an excellent effect of divine love. This is fruit that none who are not planted near the tree of life can bear.
3. The mutual effects of divine love are these, and such as are like these.
A. Union with God. Union is the foundation of communion. and communion is the exercise of union. The Spirit of God is the direct cause of this union and faith is the internal instrument on our part. But love is the internal instrument both on God’s part and ours. Christ dwells in our hearts by faith, we being rooted and grounded in love, Ephesians 3:17. This union is most directly with Christ and through him with the Father and Holy Ghost. It is an amazing and comfortable truth that our union with Christ does much resemble the personal union of the two natures of Christ, his humanity and his divinity. I grant that it is unlike it in other considerations because of the transcendency of the mystery but still there is some resemblance. For example, the human nature of Christ is destitute of its subsistence and personality by its union with and its taking up of the divine part. So also the gracious soul has no kind of denomination except that which it has from its union with Christ. Its gracious being is bound up in its union with Christ. Other men can live without Christ, but the gracious soul cannot. Again, in Christ there is a communication of properties, that is, that which is proper to the divine nature is attributed to the human, and contrarily, that which is proper to the human nature is attributed to the divine. So here, in this soul’s union with Christ, Christ has made sin for us and dealt with as if He were a sinner, while we are made the righteousness of God in Him and are privileged as righteous persons. Christ’s riches are ours and our poverty His. Moreover, The offices of Christ are attributed to believers. They are a holy and a royal priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:9, And Christ has made us kings and priests unto his Father. Revelation 1:6. Christ has a stock of created grace which is for us. Of his fullness have all we received and grace for grace. John 1:16. The Apostle bids us be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Second Timothy 2:1. What shall I say? Is Christ the natural Son of God? They are the adopted. Is Christ the beloved Son of God? Believers are so also in their measure. They are dead with Christ, buried with Christ, risen with Christ, sit together in heavenly places with Christ, and are fellow heirs with Christ. In short, as there never was another union in the world such as the union of the two natures in Christ, so there never was, nor ever can be, such a union in the world as that between Christ and the believer. It is beyond what any metaphors from art or nature can fully express. the metaphor of a foundation and building of vine and branches, of head and members, of soul and body. These are but dark shadows of this union, but I must not enlarge.
B. Communion with God. Communion consists in communication. when there is a kind of a community of property. I might review the former particulars and enlarge them, but the subject is not so barren that I need name one thing twice. Christians, I beg of you that you would be careful of receiving, because I can only be brief in delivering a few hints of the communication of divine love between God and us. For example, God communicates the divine nature to us through his fulfilling exceeding great and precious promises. 2 Peter 1:4. We make returns as those that are born of God by obeying his commands. Because God loves us, He communicates unto us His communicable properties of holiness, wisdom, and goodness. Seeing we have nothing to return, we prostrate ourselves at His feet and genuinely acknowledge our unholiness, folly, and badness. God and the soul hold communication in all gracious actions. God communicates strength for the doing of those things which he cannot do, but which we must to repent, believe, and obey God. These are our actions through his strength. So also we exercise our graces upon God for those actions which we cannot do, but which we may, with humble thankfulness, say He must do through His covenant engagement. For instance, the pardon of sin, speaking peace to the conscience, the giving out of His gracious influences, and so forth. For these things we admire God, we praise Him, and we rejoice in Him. Once more, in those things wherein we can make no return to God, but may to others for God’s sake, our love to God necessitates us to do it. For instance, God pities us, is merciful and kind. to us. God is infinitely above all such returns. I, but so are not the members of Christ who are the best visible image of God in the world, I will give them not only my alms but my very bowels of mercy. In short, In this communication, God and the gracious soul have the same interest, drive on the same design, the advancement of Christ and the gospel, have the same friends and the same enemies. They communicate secrets to each other. None but the living soul knows the secrets of divine love, and none but God hears all the secrets of the soul without a reserve. Among the dearest friends in the world, there is some reserve. Some things we would rather speak to a stranger than to our dearest bosom friend. We think them not fit to mention, or we are loathe to trouble them. But there is none of this between God and the soul. God tells us all that may benefit, not overcharge us. And we tell God all the very worst of our own hearts, which we are ashamed to mention to those that most love us. God deals with us according to our capacities. Our bottles would break should God overfill them. But we deal with God according to the utmost of our active graces. God is both compassionate to pity and pardon what is no way acceptable. and even incredibly condescending to accept of what none but His infinite grace would accept.
C. Familiar Love Visits. When God makes sad visits to the disquieting of conscience and the breaking of our peace, yet even then The soul under trouble of conscience would not exchange its spiritual trouble for the best of the world’s peace. No, not for its former peace with which it was so well pleased before conversion. The soul that loves God cannot construe that to be a visit which others count so. The soul never goes to God as we go to visit those we care not for. that we are glad at their being from home, so the visit be but paid, we care not. Pray, compare some passages in that song of loves. In one you have the spouse inquiring of Christ. Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon. For why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?” Song of Solomon 1:7. It is as if he had said, Tell me, O Lord, my love and life, where I may have both instruction and protection in an hour of trouble, lest by your absence I be seduced by those that only pretend to love you. Christ gives a present answer and quickly after returns an invitation. O my dove that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.” Song of Solomon 2:14. This is as if he had said, O my mourning dove that dares not stir out of your secret place, stir up your faith, hold up your face with comfort. Let me hear your prayers and praises. Though others censure them, I esteem them. Though others consider you deformed, in my eyes you are beautiful. Here is something of affection, but see more. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits. Song of Solomon 4:16. This is as if he had said, O Lord, what I have from you I return to you, except I beseech thee the fruits of obedience and praise. Christ presently accepts the invitation. I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse, I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey. I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, friends. Drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.” Song of Solomon 5:1. It is as if he had said, You shall no sooner ask than be answered. I accept your graces and duties, your bitter repentance and your fragrant holiness. They are most sweet to me, notwithstanding their imperfections. And you, O my friends, whether blessed angels or gracious souls, cheer yourselves with the same spiritual dainties wherewith I am refreshed. This is much, but there is more in the next expression that I shall name. Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me.” Song of Solomon 6:5. As if he had said, I am ravished and vanquished by your fixed eye of faith. In short, see the spouse’s closing request. Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young heart upon the mountains of spices. Song of Solomon 8:14. As if he had said, as I began this song, my dearest Savior, with passionate desires of your first coming by the preaching of the gospel. So, though I thankfully praise you for all the communion I have had with you, yet I cannot, my Lord, but more passionately long for your glorious coming, to take me with you from these bottoms of death and valleys of tears, to those eternal heights where nothing springs but life and glory. that instead of this song I may sing a new one to the Lamb and to him that sits upon the throne unto all eternity. Thus, but in a far more seraphic manner than I am able to express, the soul-loving God as the God-loving soul are rejoicing in each other with joy until they rest in each other’s love, Zebaniah 3:17. In short, The soul that loves God is never so well as when most directly with Him. And while there is any distance, many a love glance passes between God and the soul, even in the greatest crowd of business and diversions.
D. Putting a love interpretation upon all things. God looks upon the very miscarriages of those whom he loves as their infirmities and puts a better interpretation upon them than they dare do themselves. The disciples slept when Christ made them watch. They knew not what to answer him. Christ himself excuses it better than they could in saying, the spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak. Mark 14:37-38. So also is the loving soul as loath to take anything ill at the hands of God. When it is never so bad with the soul, he blesses God that it is no worse. God and the loving soul do those things towards each other which nothing but love can put a good interpretation upon. The truth is, without love it would be intolerable. For example, God requires that the service of the gracious soul that he requires of no other, namely to bless God when persecuted, to rejoice in tribulations, to hope against hope, and so forth. God puts the soul that loves him upon those trials that he puts upon no other. Namely, those chastisements from himself, those reproaches from men, those buffetings from Satan, which are peculiar to the saints. But under all these, the soul heartily loves God. Furthermore, the soul grows upon God in prayer, and the more it receives from God, the more insatiable it is, and God loves the soul the better for it. When afflictions are extreme, those that love God put the affliction upon the account of God’s faithfulness. On the other hand, when the poor soul is foiled and Satan runs with the tidings of it to set God against him, God pities the soul and scolds the accuser. And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him. And the Lord said unto Satan, The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and stood before the angel. And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. Zechariah 3:1-4. Here is Joshua the high priest. While executing his office and offering sacrifices and prayers for the people, Satan arraigns him as a prisoner at the bar. and the accusation being true and vehement, Satan takes the upper hand. But now, Jesus Christ, who is both the patron and judge of saints, cuts him short with a vehement reproof and tells him those sins could not make void that choice which they could not at first hinder. And further, Christ, as it were, tells him they had been severely punished half-burned and wasted by the heat of God’s displeasure. And would he now rekindle that fire? No. Satan, thy charge is thrown out of the court. His sins shall be pardoned, his graces multiplied, and upon the faithful discharge of his office he shall have places to walk among them that stand by.:7, alluding to the walks and galleries about the It is as if he had said, you shall walk with these glorious angels. They shall be your companions and guardians where Satan has no place. In this way, Christ loves us so more and not less for Satan’s accusations. To all these effects, add these concomitants. those things that have agreement with or are nearly related to divine love. They do not really differ from it, but express some part or manner of it as love under some other form or notion. I shall only mention two such concomitants.
1. Devotion which is an absolute delivering up of ourselves to God’s worship and service, so as by no flatteries or dangers to be diverted. Meditate upon these things, give thyself completely to them, that thy profiting may appear to all. 1st Timothy 4:15. Herein lies the strength of religion and the spiritual pleasure of it. Herein the soul can say with some kind of triumph Behold, my God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song. He also has become my salvation. Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12:2-3. Christians We must not merely be barely frequent in religious actions, but we must act as those that are given up to God. We must mind the fervor of religion. We must be exceedingly watchful over our thoughts to keep them from vanity, and over our affections to keep them from entanglement. I would therefore commend it to you to single out, every morning, some short passages of scripture or some encouraging promise that has affected you to roll in your minds or to lie upon your hearts all day in order to maintain this holy fervor. Nothing works and keeps such an impression upon the heart as scripture.
2. The other concomitant is zeal. which is the most intense degree of desire and endeavor to please and honor God. It is the boiling up of the affections to the greatest heat. This must be the companion of every grace. Now, zeal is expressed against sin or in duty.
A. The exercise of zeal against sin. I beg of you to observe this rule. Namely, whatever act of zeal you express toward others, double it first upon yourselves. Whatever evil you reprove or would reform in others, be doubly strict against it in yourselves. This is Christ’s counsel. Cast out the beam out of thine own eye. and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:5. My eye is not capable of having a beam in it, but a mote in my own eye should be to me as a beam in comparison of what it is in another’s. Take a few instances from Scripture, for this needs to be instilled into the present age. In the case of dishonor done to God and yourselves, compare Moses’ carriage. Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses and they said, hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? Hath he not spoken also by us? And the Lord heard it. But Moses was as if he had heard it not, for he was very meek. above all the men that were upon the face of the earth.” Numbers 12:1-3. He was so indeed, but it was only this way in his own cause. When the glory of God is concerned, you will find him to be of rather another temper. As soon as he saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’s anger waxed hot and he took the calf which they had made and burnt it in the fire and ground it to powder and strawed it upon the water and made the children of Israel drink it. Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come unto me. And he said, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” Exodus 32:19-20 and 26-27. Here is one ice cold in his own cause, yet fire hot in God’s. Take another instance of Paul. Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am, for I am as ye are. Ye have not injured me at all. Galatians 4:12. It is as if he had said, the wrong you have done me I count as nothing. But to Elemas, who would hinder the inner child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness.” Acts 13:10, and he strikes him blind. I instance in these now because I mentioned them before as singularly eminent in their love to God.
B. For zeal about duties, I command unto you this rule. In every duty you take in hand, endeavor to do it above your strength. not only to the uttermost of your strength but above it. I base this rule upon the commendation given to the churches of Macedonia. For to their power I bear record, yea, and beyond their power they were willing of themselves. 2nd Corinthians 8:3. My brethren, it becomes us in everything of piety to pant after the most perfection attainable. Not as though I were already perfect, but I labor after, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before. Philippians 3:12-14. And David says, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. Psalm 69:9. in a word, we must not only be sometimes zealous under pangs of conscience, but always in the whole frame of our conversation. It is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing. Galatians 4:18. And not only when a minister or some other is present who may commend you.
5. The last thing I propose to do is to urge some persuasives to be graciously ambitious of such qualifications and as graciously diligent in such exercises. And here I must bypass more arguments than I can so much as mention. For the truth is you can name nothing in the world but that it may be an argument to promote our love to God. That array. Consider that our God is our great benefactor, and I mention this twice that it may be often in your thoughts. Who can reckon up the benefits we receive from God? If love is to be recompensed with love, greater love was never shown than this, that God has given His Son to die for His enemies. If love is to be purchased at any rate, who can give more for it than eternal life? If love is to be bestowed gratias, who more worthy of it than God? And can you then do less than love Him? It is commended as an expedient to overcome the worst of our enemies. If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him drink. For in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Romans 12:20. Oh, what hearts have we that mercies will not melt them? Reflect a little upon yourselves. We bargain with little children for their love. If we give them but an apple or a plum, we presently ask, will you love me? And if they promise to love us, we then inquire, how will you love me? Oh, dear Christians, turn to your God Solomon tells us that a gift whithersoever returneth, it prospereth. Proverbs 17:8. Shall God’s gifts be the only exception to that proverbial maxim? For shame, Christians! Let us strive for who shall be first in crying. O come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Psalm 95:8. Know ye that the Lord, He is God? It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.” Psalm 100:3. Oh, love the Lord, all ye His saints, for the Lord preserveth the faithful. Psalm 31:23. God is pleased to give us in actual possession what His wise love thinks fittest for us, and God is pleased to give us promises suitable to every condition we can be in this world. For instance, in the case of need, take no thought saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed, Matthew 6:31. Surely, if we may be solicitous about any worldly concern, it is about food and raiment. But Christ charges us, upon our Christianity, not to be thoughtful about them. For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.:32. But, one may say, if we do not take care for food and raiment, we must starve. Christ says, Nay. There is no danger of them, for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.” That’s:32 as well. Were this believed, men would lay aside their callings, but there is no warrant for that. Christ lays down a rule for our practice as the condition of the promise. Seek ye first, not only, but first. the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then in a way of diligence, not negligence, all these things shall be added unto you. That’s:33. This in respect of need. Take yet another in case of danger.
A. The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous runneth into it and is safe. Proverbs 18:10. Oh, how safe is that person that is, as it were, garrisoned in the divine attributes. Or in the case of suffering, verily I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my sake and the Gospels. but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time.” Mark 10:29-30. There is a hundredfold more comfort in parting with all for Christ than he could have had in keeping all and denying of him. But why should I name particulars? There is enough in one scripture, whence to form many incentives to love God. We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28. Pray, mark this place. We, it is not only the Apostle, but all believers. No, it is not we only think or hope, but we know that all things, all those afflicting providences which are most grievous to be born, all those dark providences which we know not what to make of, work together Though we cannot presently anatomize every particular providence, yet in their contexture, we cannot but say they are gracious and for good. They are for the spiritual and eternal good of all those that love God. One may say, oh, but here I stick. I cannot say I love God. Well, read on. The next clause is the best interpreter of this. to them that are the called according to His purpose. That is plainly to those that obey Christ’s call in His Word, to all that are converted, to all that are willing to be taught and ruled by Jesus Christ. Though you dare not own your conversion, yet you dare not deny this evidence of it. Namely, that you would feign comply with Christ in everything.
B. Love to God ennobles all other graces. I will not meddle with the controversy about faiths being informed by love, or love being, as it were, the soul of faith. The scripture tells that faith worketh by love, Galatians 5:6, and it is by loving nothing as much as God. Love is the most ingenuous grace, the most heavenly grace, the most God-like grace. All other graces are more or less excellent as they are enlivened by love to God. Solace, from his book, Treatise on the Love of God, illustrates it thus, quote, The general of an army, having gained some renowned victory, will have all the glory of it, for he ordered the battle and led them on. We name the services of the several parts of the army, both the vanguard, the body, the wings, the rear. So here, some Christians are singular for faith, others for alms or deeds, some for prayer, others for humility. But love to God commands all these. Love commands patience to bear, and hope to wait, and faith to believe.” Elsewhere he compares love to scarlet, which is a royal cloth, not for the wool, but for the dye. Well, so a soul, as it were, double-dipped in love to God, is the most excellent Christian.
C. Love to God rectifies all other loves and keeps them in due bounds. The same author had this other illustration. I may love my servant, but if I do not love my child better than I love my servant, I am defective in my love. Well then, I must love my child, but if I do not love my wife better than I love my child, I am defective in my love. Well then, I must love my wife, but if I do not love God infinitely more than I love my wife, I am defective in my love. You see a mother so busy about her child as if she had no love for anyone else, as if her eyes were for nothing else but to look upon it, and her mouth for nothing else but to kiss it. But now, if she must lose either her child or her husband, her love to her husband is so great that it is as if she had no love for her child at all. Even so, When God and those we most dearly love stand in competition, you may soon see the subordination of our love. Though, let me add this for your encouragement, God never calls for the hating of other things for love to himself, but he does most singularly make in himself whatever anyone may part with for his sake. when God requires the banishment of other objects. It is to communicate himself more fully, more clearly, and more sweetly. Look over what martyrology you please. I think you will scarce find so much as one dying for Christ any other way than triumphing, where as many of as eminent graces as they die in their beds, little less than despairing What encouragement may this be for the worst of times?
4. Our love to God more sensibly quiets our hearts than God’s love to us. For though God’s love to us is infinitely greater than our love to God, yet until His love for us has drawn out our love for Him, we do more abuse his kindness than other persons do whom he does not love in such a manner. This is most evident in a person just upon the borders of conversion, but yet unconverted. God is abundant in his love of benevolence. He is now engaged upon the making of means effectual for his thorough regeneration. But now in this work there are several things to be done, which, though they speak greater love on God’s part than ever he before showed him, yet while God is at work, the person quarrels with God more than about any form of providences of his life. God, to tame him, brings him under great afflictions. upon which he either flies in his face or lies sullen at his feet and thinks he may well do so. Well, but God will not leave him thus. God follows him with terrors of conscience. The arrows of God stick fast in him, and the poison thereof drinks up his spirits. But he will not yet yield. He holds fast his iniquity. which he is as loath to part with as his own life, and rather hates than loves God for all this kindness. In this way, until he is brought to love God, God’s love to him does in no way quiet him. By this you may plainly see that, let God’s love to us be never so great, we misinterpret all until we love God again. And then, let God do what He will. He is quiet. Let His sufferings be next to hell torments. He will not allow one hard thought of God. Therefore, be persuaded to get, increase, and exercise this love to God with all your hearts, souls, and minds. I have been too long already and therefore will be as brief as may be in answering these two complaints.
Complaint 1. All that has been said makes me fear that I have no true love for God at all. I cannot say that I love God more than the creature. I feel my heart more sensibly warping towards the world in the service of God than springing towards God in my worldly affairs. To this I answer by these distinctions.
Distinction 1. We must distinguish between the estimation of our love and the commotion of it. The commotion may be greater where the estimation is less. One whose love is fixed upon God, though he is so far from forsaking God, that he will forsake all things for God. Yet he may, until he recollects himself, be more moved with some petty loss. In short, he may have some violent gust of affection after other things. But the constant breathings of his soul are after God.
Distinction 2. We must distinguish between the solidity of our love and the flashiness of it. Between a superficial and a lasting joy. For instance, a covetous man may laugh more when he is tickled than when you give him a thousand pounds, but he is a thousand times more joyful of his thousand pounds than of his being tickled. The soul’s love to God is well-rooted, Ephesians 3:17. A sick man is pleased with one that will sit with him and alleviate his pains by diversion, but he is more pleased with that man that shall cure him. While our souls are in a sickly frame, we are pleased a little with a variety of diversions, but we soon see their emptiness and charge our souls to return unto God for a perfect cure.
Distinction 3. We must distinguish between our spiritual love and our sensible love. While we live in this world, such as our weakness, through the remainders of sin and imperfection of grace, that our animal and vital spirits are more affected with sensible things than with spiritual. The things of the world are near to us, and we cannot live without them. But he that loves God never says upon the enjoyment of them, So take thine ease. Luke 12:19. Oh no, he is angry and grieved that he is at all pleased about such things.
Complaint 2. I hope I am not wholly destitute of this excellent grace, yet I am afraid to own that I have it. Is it impossible to get my heart above this uncomfortable uncertainty? that my heart were more raised and fixed above this anxious temper. I will close with an essay to answer this complaint. Only premise, but not anything that shall or can be spoken, be rested to give the least encouragement imaginable to anything of sin. Take heed that you do not upon any account gratify your sloth or indifference of spirit, or any sins of omission. Keep off this rock, and then your solicitude about your fickleness gives you grounds of hope to get above it. Therefore, take these short directions on how to get and keep the most certain, constant, comfortable, spiritual frame of divine love that is to be had upon earth.
1. Keep a severe watch against all sins, yet give not way to drooping fears because of unavoidable infirmities. If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, Who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared. Psalm 130:3-4.
2. Observe your own temper. What it is that most draws out your love to any person or anything in this world? And improve that very inducement to love God. He is altogether lovely. Song of Solomon 5:16. That is, imagine or name anything that is most desirable, most worthy to be loved and admired, and that is He.
3. Endeavor to love God out of duty when, to your own apprehension, you cannot love Him out of grace. I would commend this to you for all your gracious carriage towards God and for all the kindness you would receive from God. For instance, repent as it is a duty even while you fear you lack the grace of repentance. Believe as it is a duty while you think you cannot act faith as a grace. So justify God, that is, acknowledge God to be righteous, though He condemns you. When you fear God, will not justify you. Sanctify God, that is, celebrate God’s holiness. When you fear He will not sanctify you, that is, not make you holy. So set yourselves to love God. Take heed that you do not offend Him. Do all you can to please Him. Take up with nothing on this side Himself. In short, let God find you in a way of duty.
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