Man's love to his God is like the changing sand--_His_ is like the solid rock. Man's love is like the passing meteor with its fitful gleam. _His_ like the fixed stars, shining far above, clear and serene, from age to age, in their own changeless firmament. Do we know anything of the words of this message? Could it be written on our hearts in life? Were we to die, could it be inscribed on our tombs, "This is one whom _Jesus loved_?" Happy assurance! The pure spirits who bend before the throne know no happier. The archangels--the chieftains among principalities and powers, can claim no higher privilege, no loftier badge of glory! Love is the atmosphere they breathe. It is the grand moral law of gravitation in the heavenly economy. God, the central sun of light, and joy, and glory, keeping by this great motive principle every spiritual planet in its orbit, "for _God is love_." That love is not confined to heaven. It may be foretasted here. The sick man of Bethany knew of it, and exulted in it. Though in the moment of dissolution he had to mourn the personal absence of his Lord, yet "believing" in that love, he "rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory." His sisters, as they stood in sorrowing emotion by his dying couch, and thought of that hallowed fraternal bond which was about so soon to be dissolved, could triumph in the thought of an affection nobler and better which knit him and them to the Brother of brothers--and which, unlike any earthly tie, was indissoluble. And what was experienced in that lowly Bethany home, may be experienced by us. That love in its wondrous manifestation is confined to no limits, no age, no peculiar circumstances. Many a Lazarus, pining in want, who can claim no heritage but poverty, no home but cottage walls, or who, stretched on a bed of protracted sickness, is heard saying in the morning, "Would God it were evening! and in the evening, Would God it were morning!" if he have that love reigning in his heart, he has a possession outweighing the wealth of worlds!