Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted--it is
just _that_ which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear,
and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His
life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and
flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives
before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God
like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the
man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to
Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his
sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without
considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in
Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love
might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he
writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree
should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be
possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so
completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the
will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted
as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]
Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect
exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this
love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his
soul's insight, becomes {26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self,
and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says,
"are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the
foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has
never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way
will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept
damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is
so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and
best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to
be damned for the love of God never will be damned!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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