The love of Christ for his people is as mysterious and wonderful as his divine person. The Christian can no more understand how great is Christ's love for him than he can understand what it means that Christ is the eternal Son of God. Scientific experts may be able to weigh the earth or measure the oceans but there is no measuring-rod for infinity, and the measurement of a Saviour's affection and attachment to those for whom he died is infinite in its scale.

It is a thousand pities that we do not stop often enough to ponder this love which our Lord and Master has for us. It would transform our present life into something more akin to heaven-on-earth if we did. We misguidedly allow our moods and feelings to be dictated by our circumstances, our health and our critics. The way to get back the lost romance of our Christian faith is to fill our minds with the certainty that Jesus Christ is more attached to the weakest Christian in his affections than he is to all other created beings whatsoever.

The reasons for our human affection are not always easy to give. We love for rational reasons but we cannot say what all the factors are which draw forth our affection. Natural relationship provides the first basis for our experience of love. Our hearts instinctively flow out in attachment to our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters. As we mature we discover our affections drawn to one outside our family circle to whom we become bound in a blessed life-long relationship of husband or wife.

This is as high as natural love can rise. It is a great and wonderful degree of love. But it is not the highest degree of love which we can know. Religious conversion carries our affections to a higher level still. If it does not, we are not Christians because 'he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me' (Matthew 10:37). The grace of conversion lifts our affections to a point above all natural affection. The Christian loves Christ above every other object of love.

However, the Christian's love for Christ, even at its best and at its height, is poor by comparison with His love for each one of His people. There are dimensions to Christ's love which beggar our powers of thought or imagination and yet which we do well to recall frequently. The Spirit of God speaking in the Scripture informs us of it as love in all its 'breadth, and length, and depth, and height' (Ephesians 3:18). It is a delightful way of telling us that in whichever direction we travel we are still embraced by Christ's love and care. Though we should mount to the stars or dig deep as the deepest mines we are as Christians the objects of Christ's perfect protection and redemptive grace. The universe is too small for us as Christians to get beyond Christ's love.

The believer would do well to roll himself in this love of Jesus and wrap himself in it each day. By this we mean that he should take time daily to get his mind and heart worked up to a sense of the truth and reality of Christ's love for him personally. We are terribly guilty of emptying the Bible's words of their meaning and power. We end up with a mind full of great biblical terms and phrases but do not somehow savour the truth and reality of these phrases in our souls. This is true even of the oft-repeated biblical expression 'the love of Christ'. How many times we read it in God's Word — and how many times it leaves us unmoved by its sublime significance!

There is not the least excuse for our habitual coolness when in the Bible we read of Christ's love for us. It is a love which has been exhibited and dis­played upon the Cross. There is such a thing as secret love, or affection which one person has for another and yet which he never tells and never speaks about, or else never demonstrates. But Christ's affection for believers is not of this kind. While the shadow of the Cross was falling upon our Saviour's spirit he pointed out to his disciples in the Upper Room that he was about to demonstrate his love to them in the highest possible way:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13

We have a Saviour whose affection for us is no mere theory. His claims are supported by compelling evidence: blood, sweat, tears and death.

We do a disservice to our Master and to our own souls when we doubt his love towards us. There are many ways of doubting his love. Sometimes we fall into the habit of regarding Christ's love as all in the past: 'He died on the Cross for me a long time ago'. But the same Saviour lives today and forever with the same love for the same persons. If he loved us before we were born and died for us while as yet we were only names of lost sinners in his Book, how much more does he love us today, now that we are brought into being and into a state of grace! Does not Paul say much the same:

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life?Romans 5:10

We must not make a crucifix of Christ. His goodness towards us is not petrified in the past but is as fresh and full as when the blood streamed down his blessed face while he made good the words he had before spoken: 'For their sakes sanctify myself ... I lay down my life for the sheep' (John 17:19; John 10:15).

A common fault with us is that we try to read the measure of the love of Jesus from the outward circumstances of our lives. When the sun shines we believe his love. But when the clouds gather we doubt it. When we do not see our prayers at once answered we sink into gloom and morbidity. When troubles gather all round us in a dark cluster we conclude that he has forgotten us.

It seldom occurs to us that Christ is best known when we are in trouble, pain or reproach. We forget who it was that led Israel out of Egypt through the Red Sea; or who guided them through the wilderness to the Promised Land; or who appeared with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace; or who said to Paul in the shipwreck, 'Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought before Caesar' (Acts 27:24). We need to go again to Samuel Rutherford's Letters to call to mind that it is in the place of suffering that Jesus Christ is to be enjoyed best. Our faith is too accustomed to being only in the shallows.

By how many forgotten or else unnoticed ways does Jesus Christ prove to us his everlasting love! Have we forgotten that it was impossible for us ever to have come to him without his own power and grace? Our first signs of conviction made him rejoice. His affection towards us kindled as he saw us first learning to recognise the world's emptiness and heard our first prayers tell him that we could not bear to live without him. He rejoiced in heaven as he watched our early struggles against sin, our escape from the devil's prison-house, our ignorant and tearful efforts to find him, and in him to find life and peace. It was all his love towards us.

Only as we pause, collect our senses together and look back do we see how kindly he has led us from the hour of our first conversion till now The wolf and the hireling have caught and deceived thousands; but they have not deceived nor devoured us. The devil has clawed back into his den many false professors and hypocrites — perhaps even before our very eyes. But the love of Jesus has ensured that no one could snatch us out of his hand (John 10:28). It is all his unnoticed and forgotten love to us.

And what of those moments of fiery trial and temptation when our feet almost slipped away and our will to obey wavered? The memory of some of our struggles may well bring beads of sweat out on our brow. The true believer knows that Bunyan was right when he wrote of Apollyon and the 'foul fiend', of Giant Despair and of Doubting Castle. We have all been close enough to the pilgrims in their progress towards the Celestial City to know that we too have only escaped by the skin of our teeth. It came to pass only through the love of Christ that would not suffer us to be tempted above that we were able to bear (1 Corinthians 10:13). How little we have thanked him for it!

It is the way of men to parade their affections; but it is the 'glory of God to conceal a thing' (Proverbs 25:2). So we discover that the Lord Jesus Christ has greater love for his people than they either know or experience in this life. Infinite love cannot be exaggerated; but it can be, and by us in this life always is, underestimated. Like children, we mistake a frown for an alteration in the affections of one we thought loved us before. But the frowns of Christ's brow are all to teach us obedience, humility and greater dependence on his grace.

It was wisely said by an old writer that Christ 'feeds us with hunger and comforts us with desertions'. This mystery is explained like this. Christ withdraws his felt presence only to bid us run after him faster. He starves us of felt comforts so that we may be satisfied with no comforts but his own presence.

The danger which we face is that we want peace and joy rather too much. We are not mature in our knowledge of Christ till we have come to see that it is possible to make an idol of our peace. The immature, inexperienced Christian wants peace (which is right and good). But he wants it at too high a price if he seeks it where it ought not to be found.

It is possible for a Christian to seek, and for a while, to enjoy peace and joy without Christ. So Paul warns the Corinthians:

Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you.1 Corinthians 4:8

They were 'happy' and 'triumphant' but there was more of the flesh in it than of the genuine love of Christ. How different the experiences of the apostles: 'We are fools for Christ's sake ... we are weak ... we are despised' (1 Corinthians 4:10)! There is sometimes more of Christ's love in our hard circumstances than in our elated feelings. The proof will be seen in our deeper attachment, or otherwise, to his person, his truth and his cause.

The worst way to judge of Christ's love in this life is to go by outward things therefore. Surely Solomon taught us this in these words:

No man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them. All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.Ecclesiastes 9: 1b, 2

The Christian who expects Christ to make him richer than others, or healthier than others, or freer from troubles than others is ignorant of the first principles of Christ's love.

The fact is that no one knows whom Christ loves or hates by the outward circumstances of life. The evidence of Christ's love is that we have our wills subdued to obedience, that we be made sound in faith and sincere in our service. It may be that the Lord will take stern measures to produce this godly character in us at times. It may also be that those who today enjoy a full cup of religious mirth will not be most full of Christ's love in the end. Here, as in similar things, 'the first shall be last and the last first' (Matthew 19:30).

The state of grace is a mysterious condition in which things are not as they seem and are not as we commonly feel them to be. The reason is that in the state of grace we are being taught to 'walk by faith, not by sight' (2 Corinthians 5:7).

But the state of glory will be far different. There the infinite love of Christ to each particular believer will be full to capacity. Every pot — the great and the small — will be full to the very brim. All that we long to feel of a Saviour's love will be felt forever more and more to all eternity. Add to this that then we too shall love the great Jesus with a perfect love which knows no cooling moods and which will experience neither clouds nor fluctuation.

As heaven is a growing state so it must be a state in which the many-sided love of Christ is to be known by the saints more and more fully forever. We have one foot in heaven now Let us see that we get wholly there.