No one but God could have revealed that to the world, for men, and we all indeed, see nothing but its contradiction in our own limited world of experience. It needs but little imagination to construe the life of hundreds of this city's inhabitants into a vehement laughter at such a declaration as 'God is love.' From shattered, broken lives, from caverns of despair where fiends seem living rather than men, comes the existing contradiction to any such statement. no wonder the carnal mind, the merely intellectually cultured, consider us infatuated, mere dreamers, talking of love when murder and war and famine and lust and pestilence, and all the refinement of selfish cruelty abroad in the earth. But, oh the sublimity of the Abraham-like faith that dares to place the centre of its life and confidence and action and hope in an unseen and apparently unknown God, saying, 'God is love,' in spite of all appearances to the contrary; saying 'Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him.' Such faith is counted to a man for righteousness.
Look back over your own history as revealed to you by grace, and you will see one central fact growing large---God is love. No matter how often your faith in such an announcement was clouded, no matter how the pain and suffering of the moment made you speak in a wrong mood, still this statement has borne its own evidence along with it most persistently---God is love. In the future, when trial and difficulties await you, do not be fearful, whatever and whoever you may lose faith in, let not this faith slip from You---God is love; whisper it not only to your heart in its hour of darkness, but here in your corner of God's earth and man's great city, live in the belief of it; preach it by your sweetened, chastened, happy life; sing it in the consecrated moments of peaceful joy, sing until all the world around you
is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
The world does not bid you sing, but God does.
Song is the sign of an unburdened heart; then sing your songs of love unbidden, ever rising higher and higher into fuller conception of the greatest, grandest fact on the stage of Time---God is love
But words and emotions pass, precious as their influence may be for a time, so when the duller moments come and the mind comes to require something more certain and sure to consider than memory of mere emotions and stirring sentiments---consider this revelation, the eternal fact that God is Love, not, God is loving. God and love are synonymous. Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is. If your conception of love does not agree with the justice of judgement and purity and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong. It is not love you conceive of in your mind, but some vague infinite foolishness, all tears and softness and infinite weakness."
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(an excerpt from Oswald Chambers' book The Love of God)
(more to come)
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