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The sermon presents salvation as free grace offered to sinners apart from preparatory good works, while insisting that genuine reception of the gospel produces holiness. Human love for God is entirely dependent on God’s prior love, especially as displayed in Christ’s cross and saving grace. Love must be nourished through remembering mercy and exercised through generosity, care for the poor, restoration of fallen believers, and support of the church. Since Christ identifies Himself with His needy people, practical love for them is love for Christ; believers must therefore remain faithful even amid ridicule, poverty, and suffering.
Theological center: God’s prior, gracious love revealed in the gospel creates believers’ love for Him and transforms that love into holy, sacrificial obedience.
Applications: Exercise love through gospel meditation · Serve Christ through the needy · Restore fallen believers · Remain faithful under opposition
Primary texts: 1 John 4:19 · Matthew 25:45
“We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 DURING the last two Sabbath days I have been preaching the Gospel to the unconverted. I have earnestly exhorted the very chief of sinners to look to Jesus Christ, and have assured them that as a preparation for coming to Christ, they need no good works, or good dispositions, but that they may come just as they are, to the foot of the cross and receive the pardoning blood and all-sufficient merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. The thought has since occurred to me, that some who were ignorant of the Gospel might perhaps put this query—is this likely to promote morality? If the Gospel be a proclamation of pardon to the very chief of sinners, will not this be a license to sin? In what respects can the Gospel be said to be a Gospel according to holiness? How will such preaching operate? Will it make men better? Will they be more attentive to the laws which relate to man and man? Will they be more obedient to the statutes which relate to man and God? I thought therefore, that we would advance a step further and endeavor to show this morning, how the proclamation of the Gospel of God, though in the commencement addresses itself to men who are utterly destitute of any good, is nevertheless, designed to lead these very men to the noblest heights of virtue, yea, to ultimate perfection in holiness. The text tells us that the effect of the Gospel received in the heart is that it compels and constrains such a heart to love God. “We love him, because He first loved us.” When the Gospel comes to us it does not find us loving God, it does not expect anything of us, but coming with the divine application of the Holy Ghost, it simply assures us that God loves us, be we never so deeply immersed in sin, and then, the after effect of this proclamation of love is that “We love him, because he first loved us.” Can you imagine a being placed halfway between this world and heaven? Can you conceive of him as having such enlarged capacities that he could easily discern what was done in heaven, and what was done on earth? I can conceive that before the fall, if there had been such a being, he would have been struck with the singular harmony which existed between God’s great world, called heaven, and the little world, the earth. Whenever the chimes of heaven rang, the great note of those massive bells was love, and when the little bells of earth were sounded, the harmonies of this narrow sphere rang out their note, and it was just the same—love. When the bright spirits gathered around the great throne of God in heaven to magnify the…