No experience of a Christian is more profitable to the soul than to feel afresh Christ's love for him. Yet no experience is so neglected in our day. The reason for this is because of our pride and ignorance of Christ as a living Saviour. As a generation of believers we resemble the disciples of Christ before his resurrection rather than after it. This must be a sign that something is wrong with our understanding of the truth which we profess. We take our Christianity more from one another than from the Bible. We live on the shadowy side of Christian experience rather than in the full light of what is possible to attain to. What would Samuel Rutherford make of us? What would M'Cheyne or Spurgeon, both so full of Christ's love, have to say of us? It is time that we took ourselves in hand.
The reasons why we are dead to a sense of Christ's love, we have said above, is because of our pride and our ignorance of Christ himself. Surely we must admit that this is so. There is us, even after conversion, a sinful reluctance to take the time and trouble necessary to have our hearts brought into a feeling state. We learn to be content with head-knowledge of Christian truth and we allow ourselves to be bullied by the unfeeling Christianity all round us into thinking that emotions accompanying faith must be a mark of excess. For some reason we who live in the modern world are afraid of emotion. We suppose it to be a virtue to stifle tears of conviction, to suppress all talk about Christ's visits to the soul, to make it a crime to express excitement when we receive tokens of God's love to us.
It is possible to be sound in our profession of the truth yet immature in our emotional response to it. When this is true of any Christian it is a sign that he or she has not yet understood how the truth of God ought to affect us.
It was a good saying of the English martyr, John Bradford, that he made it his rule not to go away from any duty before he had felt something of Christ in it. He meant, of course, that he strove, when he prayed, always to have his heart aflame before he left off praying and that he would not lay his Bible or book down before he felt his heart burning within him (Luke 24:32). Spurgeon informs us in one of his sermons on the Song of Solomon that the famous Bernard of Clairvaus used to say to Christ: "I never go away from thee without thee." By these quaint words he meant that he waited on Christ till he had a lively sense of Him, which followed him after his devotions were over. Such expressions as the above take us to the heart of our subject.
The above-quoted sayings of Bradford and Bernard assume something which is not always very readily assumed by modern Christians, that it is possible and very desirable to get our hearts worked up with holy emotion in this way. Christ is not a mere doctrine, it must be remembered. He is a risen, glorified Saviour. His love for us today in 1997 is as great and as real as at the time when he was suffering for us on the Cross. He is as much "with us" and ministering to us by his Spirit as in the days of his flesh.
We would all regard the Gospels as very much the poorer if they were purged of all the rich human emotion which they portray. Suppose Jesus had never wept over Jerusalem or at the grave of Lazarus. Suppose Mary of Bethany had not devoutly poured our her ointment over the Saviour's body, or that Mary Magdalene had not felt enough of Christ's love to be early at the tomb weeping for his "absence". Imagine if the penitent woman of Luke 7 had not come into Simon's house to wash our Lord's feet with her tears and wipe them with her long, beautiful hair. Would these four wonderful Gospels not be greatly weakened in the power and fascination which they exert over us? If the Lord of glory had not been shown to us as sweating and groaning in the course of his mighty wrestlings to deal with our sin and liability to eternal death, would we not be vastly poorer in our understanding of his love for us? Emotion is not suppressed in the Bible and we have no right to ignore its place in the lives of Bible characters - or our own.
The things of God are all great and mighty things and they should exert a great and mighty influence upon us in every way. The Bible is not a quarry for scholars to research in and nothing more. It is not a text-book for religious education only. It is not simply a fountain of proof-texts. It is a God-given account of how he himself has taken steps to redeem us from death and hell, to translate us from darkness into light, to lift us from sin to grace and from grace to glory at last. All of this stupendous divine plan is concentrated on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, our beloved Saviour. He is its Alpha and Omega. He is its Yea and its Amen. Surely we cannot, dare not, must not allow ourselves to read the Bible, which speaks of him, and not also make it our regular rule and practice to feel some of his love to us as we read it.
One of the reasons why men read the Bible and feel nothing as they read it is that they do not approach it in the right way and with the right understanding. We should see Christ in the Bible everywhere. He is present at the beginning of time as our Creator. He is the One worshipped by the patriarchs. Abraham, like all before and after him in the Old Testament times, "rejoiced to see Christ's day" (John 8:56). They had an understanding of God's plan and in it they saw Christ as their coming Saviour and Messiah. The Mosaic rituals all speak to us of Christ. Every drop of sacrificial blood shed in the olden times was emblematic of Christ's blood. All the offices of theocratic man - kings, priests, prophets - shadowed forth aspects of the Saviour's person and work. All prophecies and oracles were preparatory in one way or another to the coming of Jesus Christ to perform his magnificent ministry of redemption. To read the Bible with academic, critical or other interests to the forefront of our minds is to miss the mark and to lose the blessing. We are above all to read the Bible so as to "meet" Christ in it. It is because we are too often "fools and slow of heart to believe" that the Scriptures all point to Jesus that we put them down without our hearts having been stirred within us.
Shame on us as a generation of professing Christians if we get excited more about other things than about the love of Christ! But it is often the case that professing Christians are. The lust of many other things enters in and love for Christ grows cold. Minutes are spent on prayers; hours on sport. Minutes are left for Bible-reading and (if at all) for family worship; hours are given over to watching television. It is time to take stock and to throw out the challenge. When will we begin to climb higher? Who among us will break the mould of Christian mediocrity and reach for the high examples set for us by our great Reformed forefathers?
It is possible to enjoy much more of Christ's love and to be much more full of his Holy Spirit than most are at this hour. There is not a church in the country of in the world that does not need to see more shining faces than they see at present. The greatest need we all have is for more of the burning heart. It cannot be concealed when it exists. It will show itself in unctuous prayers, in heavenly talk, in holy living, in fervent affection, in patient suffering and in ardent hoping for blessing from God. There is today great talk about "love", but small experience of it. Yet it is only as we ourselves burn with a felt sense of Christ's love to us that we shall radiate that love to others. Steel is molten in the furnace and so must the soul become incandescent in the fire of Christ's love before it can burn as it needs to do.
There is a terrible reluctance to talk seriously about godly emotion in the modern church. This is very strange when we recall that excitement and enthusiasm are expected everywhere else in life. Who ever heard of audiences attending sporting events without excitement? Or popular places of entertainment? Theatres, operas, concerts, films - all attract crowds because they generate emotion in the human heart for a few brief hours. And shall we who know Christ as our glorified Lord and God be the only people on earth to suppress our feelings in a flat monotony of emotional dullness?
It was not so in the great ages of the church that are past. The early church had experience of Christ's presence in a felt manner. They knew of "love shed abroad in the heart" (Rom. 5:5), "peace that passeth all understanding" (Phil 4:7), "joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Pet. 1:8), "boldness" such as men have only after being much in the presence of Christ (Acts 4:13). The first Christians were like men "full of new wine" (Acts 2:13). They dealt a death-blow to men's consciences by the power of their testimony and "turned the world upside down" by their proclamation of the gospel (Acts 17:6). That they did so, that the Reformers later did so and that the Methodists after them did so can only be explained by one thing: they were men who felt the love of Christ and were constrained by it. Such things may well put us to shame in our day.
It will not do to excuse our low levels of spiritual emotion to say that some groups of Christians let their emotions dictate them or that they run to extremes. Let our heads be filled with knowledge and our memories with instruction. Let our bookshelves be laden with all the best books and our hours spent in reading them. But let all this include a belief in the place of spiritual affections in a believer's life. Truth may, and must, be studied so as to set our souls on fire. There is nothing at all in the Christian's life more important than the enjoyment of Christ's love. If our reading and our studying do not lead us many a time into "wonder, love and praise", we lack understanding and are coming short.
Of the many aids available to us to correct an unfeeling state of soul, we may mention two: meditation and godly conversation. The one we may do on our own privately, the other in the company of other Christians. By meditation, we refer to the practice of concentrating our thoughts on one or other of the great doctrines of the gospel till our hearts are affected. This is not emotionalism or contrived spirituality. It is to gather honey from the comb. A little time spent in this way, either at home or as we work, may lift our spirits in heaven. "As I mused the fire burned" (Psa. 39:3). Our great Puritan divines did much in this way. In our busy age we dare not neglect it.
When in Christian company we should make it our general rule to raise the conversational level to spiritual subjects, especially the subjects which are best fitted to warm the affection. Having got into a spiritual theme of conversation be sure to keep it there. Do not lower the tone of conversation to ordinary subjects. As we practise this habit of spiritual conversation we shall find our aptitude and our appetite both increasing in it. It is the pattern which our Saviour himself gives us in the Gospels. He never utters "an idle word". Everything that drops from his lips is good for edifying. It is a very high standard to aim at but we must practise it for ourselves one with another as Christians.
As we do these things we shall find many a time that "Jesus himself draws near" by his Spirit. Is it not what he himself promised: "Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name" (Mal. 3:16)? Ryle somewhere speaks critically of some Christians who "in conference add nothing" (Gal. 2:6). It is a poor testimonial to have if we do not edify one another by affectionate spiritual talk when we meet one another as believers.
There will always be some who despise the things that we have been discussing here. But they are not our examples to follow. Rather let us expect that from time to time as we wait upon the Lord we shall find him wonderfully close to us to give us fresh draughts of his love and to rise upon us "with healing in his wings" (Mal. 4:2).
Would that he might visit us all more often and put the cup of spiritual expression to our lips. His love is "better than wine" (Song of Sol. 1:2).
(Taken from Banner of Truth Magazine, 1997 Issue, pages 1 to 5.)
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