The Heart Of The Gospel; Part 2 - God Loved & Gave
Let us look at the words "loved" and "gave".
He loved and gave. I have no desire to enter into nice distinctions, but with the simplicity of a little child approach this heart of the Gospel. And yet a child will understand that when we use the word love, we sometimes mean one thing and sometimes another. For instance, suppose that you should try to get some poor criminal out of prison, a miserable, filthy, degraded, defiled man. Somebody asks you why you do it, and you say that you love him. Now, that would not be taken to mean the same kind of love as you bear your mother. Those are very different loves, the love that you bear to your mother and the love that you bear to some vile criminal. The word love has a different meaning in different cases. The apostle John says, "We love Him because He first loved us." [John 4:19] Was not the love of God to us something different from the love that we bear to Him? I love God because I know him to be the most beautiful, the most wise, the most glorious, the most fatherly, the most tender, the most pitiful, the most gracious Being in the universe. Why did He love me? Because He saw that I was beautiful and truthful, and lovely, and honest, and honorable? Not so, says the apostle. "But God commanded His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." [Romans 5:8]
So there are two kinds of
love. We call them the love of “complacence” and the love of “compassion”.
Complacence means a feeling of pleasure. You love a beautiful person, a lovely
character, because you see something in the person and in the character that
draws out your love.
But that is not the kind of love that we call the love of compassion, for such
love is bestowed on people in whom we do not see anything beautiful or lovely.
We love them for the sake of the good that we may do them, and for the sake of
the beautiful character that, by grace, we may help to develop in them. So,
therefore, the love of complacence is intensive, but the love of compassion is
extensive; the love of complacency is partial, the love of compassion is
impartial; the love of complacency is exclusive and select, the love of
compassion is inclusive and universal. The love of complacence is a kind of
selfish love, but the love of compassion is a generous love. The love of
complacency may be an involuntary love: we see the qualities that attract
affection, and we love unconsciously and involuntarily; but the love of
compassion is voluntarily exercised. The love of complacence has to do with
comparatively few of the people whom we know; the love of compassion takes in
the whole world, and hundreds and thousands of people whom we do not know, and
never saw, but whom, for the sake of Jesus, we love.
Have you fixed that in your thought? The kind of love, then, that God had for us
is the love of compassion, extensive, inclusive, impartial, universal,
self-denying, self-forgetting, voluntary.
Now, it is the characteristic of that kind of love that it gives. We call it the
love of compassion, and compassion is another word for giving; and such love
keeps nothing, but gives everything that it has, and gives to everybody. Of
course, if God loved us after that sort He had to give. He couldn’t love if He
did not give, any more than the sun could be the sun without shining, or a
spring of water could be a spring without flowing out into a stream. And so
these words, “loved” and “gave”, naturally go together. You could not have the
one without the other. There could not be this wonderful giving without this
wonderful loving; and there could not be this wonderful loving without this
wonderful giving.