Galatians 5:6 For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision avails any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which works by love. Now observe, this "love" has nothing to do with saving you. You were saved before the "love" began. It owes its existence to the fact of your being saved. It is no cause, it is an effect — an invariable effect — an effect which loves the presence of the cause. "We love Him because He first loved us." And now you come to the second stage. You "love:" deeply, gratefully, irrepressibly, you "love." What comes next? "Love" is a feeling which always looks about to find, or make for itself language. If it do not this, it may be a passion, but it is not "love." The language of love is action. We all wish to please where we feel affection. Therefore, by a necessary law, the forgiven soul — happy and attached — looks at lovingly — to see how it can testify its gratitude to the God of its salvation. In God's great scheme, every Christian is working under constraint of the most powerful impulse that ever animates the breast of man. It is a spring strong enough for the machine, the great machine which it has to move; but all the while he works happily because he works under the smile of God, who has forgiven him, and who loves him with an everlasting love: sure, because it is free, and certain to continue on to the end, because it was all Christ at the beginning. In this little ladder of three steps which goes up from sin to peace, and from peace to glory — the only point that unites the two worlds: faith resting on Christ, love springing out of faith, and good works crowning love — I do desire to trace with you, for a minute, how they act and re-act one upon the other, interweaving themselves endlessly, into greater and greater unity and strength. "Faith" is the only basis of "love." You cannot really "love" God until you believe that He has forgiven you. You cannot "love" an angry God. you cannot "love" an object of fear — such as God must be to every man who does not feel that he is pardoned. Well, now, see the return. Every good work re-acts to feed the "love" from which it sprang. Do not you know how, by doing something for any person, you may make yourself, at last, begin to "love" that person? Do not you know still more how, by every act of self-denying affection to those you love, you increase the feeling, and deepen the tendency of the attachment? So that the rule is good in the heavenly code, every good action, done for Christ's sake, increases spiritual affection, and enhances the desire to love — just as the dropping of the fruit strengthens the roots for the next autumn's harvest. It is a blessed thing to have a religion which I 'am now endeavouring to shew in its whole nature is a "faith which worketh by love." (J. Vaughan, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love. |
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