MR. MOODY'S THEOLOGY.

M

GOD.

HIS LOVE.

Y text is on fire to-night, [pointing to the gas

light letters above the platform, "GOD IS LOVE,"] and I wish it might be burned into all your hearts. There is no text that the devil has tried so hard to blot out of men's minds as this.

We used to have that text in letters of light over in the North Side Church, and one night a poor wanderer caught a glimpse of it through the door, which was slightly open. "God is love.' I don't believe that," he exclaimed. "I don't believe that God loves me." But he went along for a few blocks, with the text ringing in his ears, till at last he came back, stayed through the service, and at the close of it I found him weeping bitterly. The text had broken his heart, and it was not long before he was happily converted.

Some people wonder why God should love such sinners as we are. Well, I suppose it is on the same principle that the sun shines. The sun is light, and can't help shining; God is love, and he can't help loving.

Let us not think of God as we do of one another. If a man receives a wrong from another he casts him off; not so with God. He hates sin with a perfect hatred, but

he loves the sinner with a perfect love: and if you are finally lost in hell, it will be in spite of the infinite love of God. In John xiii, 1, it is said of Jesus, that “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end." He loved Judas, who betrayed him; he loved Peter, who denied him; he loved all the disciples, though, in the trying moment, every one of them forsook him and fled.

In Isaiah xlix, 15, God asks the question, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." There is no love equal to that of a mother, except it be God's. A wife may forsake her husband, but a mother will cleave to her son, even though he is denounced as a criminal, tried for his life, and finally hanged. To the last she stands by him, and when they give his poor broken body over to her, she covers his dead face with tears. But God loves us better than that. A mother may forget, but God never does.

In Jeremiah xxxi, 3, God says to Israel, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love."

"Well," says one, "I believe that. That suits me a great deal better than the sermon of last night about the blood." Don't make a mistake, my friend. God loves sinners, but he cannot bring them into heaven unless they repent and give their hearts to him. If he was to do that they would raise the flag of revolt close beside his throne, and there would be war in heaven again.

A lady came to me in England, and told me of one of her sons who was an exile from his home. He had written to ask that he might come back, and yet his

parents did not dare to bring him back, for they thought he would be sure to turn their home into a hell, and ruin all the rest of the children.

An old gentleman in New York had a wicked son, who had already sent his gray-haired mother to the grave with a broken heart; and one night, when the boy was going out, the father begged him to stay with him, saying, "You have not spent one evening at home since your mother died. Will you not stay one night with me?" "No," said the boy, "I will not."

Then the father threw himself down in the open door and said, "My son, you are stronger than I, but you shall not go out to-night, unless you go over my poor old body."

And that wicked son leaped over his father's body, and rushed away to his old companions in sin. Just so it is with a great many sinners, who rush to destruction in spite of all the tokens of the love and mercy of God.

In Isaiah xxxviii, 17, the prophet cries out, "Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back." I like that word "all." If all my sins were cast behind my back, the devil might find them and bring them up to ruin me; but when they are cast behind His back nobody can ever find them again. There are four expressions used for putting away sins. One is "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgression from us;" another is, that He puts them away "as a cloud;" another, He casts them into the sea of forgetfulness; and then this one, He casts them behind his back.

Do not try to put away your own sins. You cannot forgive yourself for robbing another man of a thousand

dollars. You may have nothing against him, but he has. something against you. Come to God and ask him to put away your sins for the sake of the blood of his Son, and he will put them away so far that nobody shall ever be able to find them again.

"In all their affliction he Our lost condition moves

In Isaiah lxiii, 9, we read, was afflicted." God pities us. his heart, so that just as he hastened down to Eden after Adam's sin, and dealt with him in grace, he will come to any sinner who will receive him, and share his sorrows, and take away his sins.

A gentleman from Manchester, England, visited Chicago just before the fire, and when he went home he tried to tell what a wonderful city it was, but nobody cared to listen to him. Pretty soon the news came over the wires that the city was on fire, and that a hundred thousand people were burned out of house and home, and were actually in danger of perishing out on the prairie, unless assistance should come at once. Then that city was full of interest about Chicago; men were in tears, and what was better, they were giving their money by thousands to send to the sufferers.

So with God. Our sorrows cry out for us louder than our sins cry out against us. He feels his heart going out to us, and sends his Son to redeem us. Here in Revelation i, 5, it speaks of Jesus Christ, who has "loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood;" not washed us and loved us, but loved us first and washed us afterward; loved us in spite of the defilement of our sins.

In Ephesians iii, 18, we are told about the height,

and depth, and length, and breadth of the love of God. My friends, if you want to know this, come to Calvary. Nothing will show you the love of God to sinners so well as the Cross of his Son, Jesus Christ.

When the French and Prussian war was going on, and the Commune was imprisoning people and putting them to death, they took a Roman Catholic archbishop and put him into a prison which had an opening in the door in the shape of a cross; and when they went to bring him out to die they found that he had written over the ends of the cross thus:

Ah! that man had been to Calvary.

Some people say, "I don't see why I have so many troubles and afflictions, if the Lord loves me so much." • Well, that is just the very proof that he does love you. That father who lets his son go on in the way to death and destruction without correcting him is the one who does not love him. "Whom the Lord loveth he chas teneth."

In Romans viii, 28, we are told that "all things work together for good to them that love God." A member of my family was sick one night, so I got a prescription