Evening and Morning
By Charles Haddon Spurgeon
June 11
Morning
"We love Him because He first loved
us."—1 John 4:19.
There is no
light in the planet but that which proceedeth
from the sun; and there is no true love to Jesus in the heart but that which
cometh from the Lord Jesus himself. From this overflowing fountain of the
infinite love of God, all our love to God must spring. This must ever be a
great and certain truth, that we love Him for no other reason than because He
first loved us. Our love to Him is the fair offspring of His love to us.
Cold admiration, when studying the works of God, anyone may have, but the warmth of love can only be kindled in the heart by God's Spirit.
How great the wonder that such as we should ever have been brought to love
Jesus at all! How marvellous that when we had
rebelled against Him, He should, by a display of such amazing love, seek to
draw us back. No! never should we have had a grain of
love towards God unless it had been sown in us by the sweet seed of His love to
us. Love, then, has for its parent the love of God shed abroad in the heart:
but after it is thus divinely born, it must be divinely nourished. Love
is an exotic; it is not a plant which will flourish
naturally in human soil, it must be watered from above. Love to Jesus is a
flower of a delicate nature, and if it received no nourishment but that which
could be drawn from the rock of our hearts it would soon wither. As love comes
from heaven, so it must feed on heavenly bread. It cannot exist in the
wilderness unless it be fed by manna from on high.
Love must feed on love. The very soul and life of our love to God is His love
to us.
"I love thee, Lord, but with no love of mine,
For I have none to give;
I love thee, Lord; but all the love is thine,
For by thy love I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied, and
lost, and swallowed up in thee."
Evening
"There brake He the
arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword, and the battle."—Psalm 76:3.
Our Redeemer's glorious cry
of "It is finished," was the death-knell of all the adversaries of
His people, the breaking of "the and the battle." Behold the hero of
Golgotha using His cross as an anvil, and His woes as a hammer,
dashing to shivers bundle after bundle of our sins, those poisoned "arrows
of the bow"; trampling on every indictment, and destroying every
accusation. What glorious blows the mighty Breaker gives with a hammer far more
ponderous than the fabled weapon of Thor! How the diabolical darts fly to
fragments, and the infernal bucklers are broken like potters' vessels! Behold,
He draws from its sheath of hellish workmanship the dread sword of Satanic power! He snaps it across His knee, as a man breaks
the dry wood of a fagot, and casts it into the fire. Beloved, no sin of a
believer can now be an arrow mortally to wound him, no condemnation can now be
a sword to kill him, for the punishment of our sin was borne by Christ, a full
atonement was made for all our iniquities by our blessed Substitute and Surety.
Who now accuseth? Who now condemneth?
Christ hath died, yea rather, hath risen again. Jesus has emptied the quivers
of hell, has quenched every fiery dart, and broken off the head of every arrow
of wrath; the ground is strewn with the splinters and relics of the weapons of
hell's warfare, which are only visible to us to remind us of our former danger,
and of our great deliverance. Sin hath no more dominion over us. Jesus has made
an end of it, and put it away for ever. O thou enemy,
destructions are come to a perpetual end. Talk ye of all the wondrous works of
the Lord, ye who make mention of His name, keep not silence, neither by day,
nor when the sun goeth to his rest. Bless the Lord, O
my soul.