Dr. D. L. Moody
AMERICAN EVANGELIST AND PUBLISHER D.L.MOODY – 1837-1899 TALKS ABOUT THE EVERLASTING LOVE OF CHRIST
IT SPEAKS IN GALATIANS ABOUT the fruit of the Spirit being love, joy, peace, gentleness, long suffering, meeker and temperance. The way this writer has put it – and I think it is very beautiful – is that joy is love exultant, peace is love in repose, and long suffering is love enduring.
It is all love, you see, a gentleness is love in society, and goodness is love in action, and faith is love on the battle-field and meekness is love at school, and temperance is love in training.
Now there are a great many that have got love and they hold the truth. I should have said they have got truth, but they don’t hold it in love, and they are very unsuccessful in working for God. They an very harsh, and God cannot use them.
Now let us hold the truth, but let us hold it in love. People will stand almost any kind of plain talk if you only do it in love. lf you do it in harshness it bounds back and they won’t receive it. So what we want is to have the truth and at the same time hold it in love.
Then there is another class of people in the world that have got the truth, but they love so much that they give up the truth because they are afraid it will hurt someone’s feelings. That is wrong. We want the whole truth anyway. We don’t want to give it up, but hold it in love, and I believe one reason why people think God doesn’t love them is because they have not experienced this love.
I met a lady in the inquiry-room today, and I could not convince her that God loved her, for she said that if he did love her he would not treat her as he had. And I believe people are all measuring God with their own rule, and we are not sincere in our love – we very often profess something we really don’t possess.
Very often we profess to have love for a person when we do not, and we think God is like us. Now God is just what He says He is, and He wants His children to be sincere in love; not to love just merely in word and in tongue, but to love in earnest. That is what God does.
You ask me why God loves. You might as well ask me why the sun shines. It can’t help shining, and neither can he help loving, because He is love himself; and anyone that says he is not love does not know anything about love. lf we have got the true love of God shed abroad in our hearts we will show it in our lives. We will not have to go up and down the earth pro- claiming it. We will show it in everything we say or do.
Oh, my friends come under the banner of heaven today. This banner is a banner of love. May it float over every soul here, is the prayer of my heart. God doesn’t will the death of any who will come under his banner of love. Sinner, may the love of God bring you into the fold. This is the prayer of my heart.
I read once of a young man who left his father, and at last that father died and the boy came to the funeral. Not a tear flowed over his cheeks during all the funeral. He saw his father laid down into the grave, and he did not shed a tear. When they came to read the will, and the boy heard that the father had dealt kindly with him and had given him some property, he began to shed tears. When that boy heard his father’s will read, his heart was broken, and he came to his father’s God.
Oh sinner, if you want to find out God’s love, take this last will and testament of Jesus Christ. He showed his love by going to. Calvary; He showed his love by hip death agony there. He loves you with an everlasting love; He doesn’t want you to perish. Oh, may you love him in return.
