LOVE.

We have for our subject this afternoon, "Love." I have often thought I wouldn't have but one text; If I thought I could only make the world believe that God is love, I would only take that text and go up and down the earth trying to counteract what Satan has been telling them-that God is not love. He has made the world believe it effectually. It would not take twenty-four hours to make the world come to God if you could only make them believe God is love. If you can really make a man believe you love him, you have won him ; and if I could only make people really believe that God loves them, what a rush we would see for the Kingdom of God! Oh, how they would rush in! But man has got a false idea about God, and he will not believe that He is a God of love. It is because he don't know Him.

Now, in Paul's farewell letter to the Corinthians, in the 13th chapter, 2d Corinthians, he says: "Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect. Be of good comfort. Be of one mind. Live in peace, and the God of love "-he calls Him the God of love-" and peace shall be with you." Then John, who was better acquainted with Christ, telling us about the love God has for this perishing world, writes in this epistle in the evening of his life these words: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and

knoweth God, and he that loveth not knoweth no God, for God is love." We built a church in Chicago a few years ago, and we were so anxious to make people believe that God is love that we thought if we could not preach it into their hearts we would burn it in, and so right over the pulpit we had the words put in gas jets, "God is love," and every night we had it there. A man going along there one night glanced in through the door and saw the text. He was a poor prodigal, and he passed on, and as he walked away he said to himself, “God is love? No. God is not love. God does not love me. He does not love me, for I am a poor, miserable sinner. If God was love, He would love me. God is not love." Yet there the text was, burning down into his soul. And he went on a little way further, and turned around and came back and went into the meeting. He didn't hear what the sermon was, but the text got into his heart, and that is what we want. It is of very little account what men say, if God's word only gets into the heart. And he stayed after the meeting was over, and I found him there, weeping like a child; but as I unfolded the Scripture and told him how God had loved him from his earliest childhood all along, the light of the Gospel broke into his mind, and he went away rejoicing. This would be the best meeting to-day we have had yet, if we could only make this audience believe that God is love.

Now, our brother who opened the meeting with prayer referred to the difference between human and Divine love. That is the very trouble with us. We are all the time measuring God's love by ours. We know that we love a man as long as he is worthy, and then we cast him off; but that is not Divine love. There would be no hope for any of us if the Lord did that, and I have the idea that our mothers are to blame for a good deal of that in their teaching during our childhood. They tell their children

that the Lord loves them when they are good children, and when they are bad children the Lord does not love them. That is false teaching. God loves them all the time just the same as you love your children. Suppose a mother should come in here with a little child, and after she has been here a while the child begins to cry, and she says, "Keep still," but the child keeps on crying, and so she turns him over to the police and says, "Take that child, I don't want him." What would you say of such a mother as that? Teach a child that God loves him only so long as he is good, and that when he is bad the Lord does not love him, and you will find that when he grows up, if he has a bad temper he will have the idea that God hates him because he thinks God don't love him when he has got a bad temper, and as he has a bad temper all the time, of course God does not love him at all, but hates him all the time. Now God hates sin, but He loves the sinner, and there is a great difference between the love of God and our love-all the difference in the world between the human and the Divine love.

Now, turn a moment to the 13th chapter of John's Gospel, 1st verse : "Now, before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world He loved them unto the end." His love is unchangeable. That night He knew very well what was going to happen. Judas had gone out to betray Him. He knew it. He had already left that little band to go out and sell Christ. Do you tell me Christ did not love Judas? That very night He said to him, "Judas, what thou doest do quickly," and when Judas, meeting Him in the garden, kissed Him, and He said, "Betrayest thou thy Master with a kiss?" was it not the voice of love and compassion that ought to have broken Judas's heart? He loved him in the very hour that he

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betrayed Him, and that is what is going to make hell so terrible, that you go there with the love of God beneath your feet. It is not that He don't love you, but spise His love. It is a terrible thing to despise love. He loved them unto the end. He knew very well that Peter was going to deny Him that night, and curse and swear because he was mistaken for Jesus's companion. He knew all His disciples would forsake Him and leave Him to suffer alone, and yet He says He loved them unto the end. And the sweetest words that fell from the lips of the Son of God were that night when they were going to leave Him. Those words that fell from His lips that night will live forever. How they will live in the hearts of God's people! We could not get on very well without the 14th of John and the 15th and the 16th. It was on that memorable night that he uttered those blessed words, and on that very night that He told them how much God loved them. It seems as if that particular night, when He was about to be deserted by all, His heart was bursting with love for His flock.

Just let us look at the 16th chapter and the 27th verse and see what He says: "For the Father Himself loveth you because ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came from God." I don't know but what Christ felt that there might be some of His disciples that would not love the Father as they loved Him. I remember for the first few years after I was converted I had a good deal more love for Christ than for God the Father, whom I looked upon as the stern Judge, while I regarded Christ as the Mediator who had come between me and that stern Judge, and had appeased His wrath; but when I got a little better acquainted with my Bible those views all fled. After I became a father and woke up to the realization of what it cost God to have His Son die, I began to see that God was to be loved just as much as His Son was. Why, it

took more love for God to give His Son to die than it would to die Himself. You would a thousand times sooner die yourself in your son's place than have him taken away. If the executioner was about to take your son to the gallows, you would say: Let me die in his stead. Let my son be spared." Oh, think of the love God must have had for this world, that He gave His only begotten Son to die for it, and that is what I want you to understand. "The Father, Himself loveth ye because ye have loved Me." If a man has loved Christ, God will set His love. upon him. Then in the 17th chapter, 23d verse, in that wonderful prayer He made that night: "I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one and that the world may know Thou hast sent Me and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me." God could look down from Heaven and see His Son fulfilling His will, and He said, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." But when it is said, "God loved us as He loved His own Son," it used to seem to me to be downright blasphemy, until I found it was in the Word of God. That was the wonderful prayer He made on the night of His betrayal. Is there any love in the world like that? Is there anything to be compared to the love of God? Well may Paul say "it passeth knowledge."

And then I can imagine some of you saying "Well, He loved His disciples and He loves those who serve Him faithfully, but then I have been untrue." I may be speaking now to some backsliders, but if I am, I want to say to every one here: "The Lord loves you." A backslider came into the inquiry-room night before last, and I was trying to tell him God loved him and he would hardly believe me. He thought because he had not kept up his love and faithfulness to God and to his own vows, that God had stopped loving him. Now, it says in John, ist chapter; "He loved them unto the end." That is, His