The Bride of Christ: Christ’s Love for His Church
Lord God in truth we do nothing in which we do not utterly depend upon you, that’s true day by day and moment by moment, we feel our weakness, we know in some measure O God our great need of You. We stretch and we do not feel we reach, we long to soar and we feel that we stumble, we ask O God that you will grant grace and mercy to us, that every heart and mind will be taking up by the glories of salvation, the wonders of the church, the redeemed bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we might see His glory, and in His glory O God see and know You. We ask these mercies through His precious name. Amen.
God is love, what word do you think most often follows that declaration in the sermons that men like us preach? I don’t have any statistics for what I am about to suggest, statistics are anyway unreliable, 73% of the time. But I do think that the word that most often follows the declaration “God is love” when men like us preach it is “But”. God is love but and we don’t mean it and we don’t intend to do it but what follows that declaration becomes a refining of that statement that often we end up refining almost out of existence. And I don’t mean that we don’t have to refine it and direct it but when our recasting of it, our qualifications or the statement becomes such to undermine or dismiss it, it has an effect not only on us but on the people to whom we are preaching. It can too easily tend towards the disposition that gives a passing glance to the love of God rather than that pondering gaze, that deep drinking from the well of divine favor. Scripture insists on God’s determined and deliberate delight in His people. It is explicit and incidental, it is both declared and demonstrated, and it comes to us over and over again in the language or imagery of a husband in regard to his wife or the bridegroom with regards to his bride. So we find for example in the prophet Hosea that extended illustration of Israel and God in the prophet and his wife. We have in Ezekiel chapter 16 that portrait again of God finding His people in all their misery and emptiness, before they were His people, and making her His people. You have the Song of Solomon in which you have patterned forth something of the favor of God towards His people. You have the language of husbanding in Isaiah, and again later on in chapter 62 God delighting over His people as a husband delights in his wife, as a bridegroom delights in his bride. And then again we have Jeremiah chapter 3 and Jeremiah chapter 31. We got the parables and patterns of the gospels in which you have the one for whom we are waiting as the bridegroom coming at the midnight hour. You’ve got John the Baptist coming declaring the fullness of his joy is when the friend of the bridegroom sees the groom coming to take his bride to himself. You’ve got Revelation 19 and Revelation 21 when you have come to the end and you see the bride in all her beauty. And here I must pause, because if you were here on, not here on Monday evening, you may be thinking “well that is a reasonable, helpful and insightful and if somewhat brief survey of relevant portions of the scripture.” If you were here on Monday you might be thinking “well that guy is even more stupid than he looks, how does he think he is going to get away with just reading that sequence of text like he came up with it.” Now here is my problem, that’s the sequence of text as I came up with it. After Monday evening, I went to Pastor Martin and the elders here and I said gentlemen I have a problem. I think I said to one of the men who knew that the problem might be coming up, he asked me afterward, “was that as bad as you thought it might be?” I said no, No more that 95 or 96% of what I intended to say, is now being covered and I am confident that Pastor Jim will tidy up the rest on Tuesday morning. I said, what do you think I should do? And some of you I consulted, and I spent some time yesterday re-exegeting the passage because I think that even in my initial intent, there was a degree of focus and emphasis and an angle of attack, if you like, that is sufficiently different, not least given the different congregations to which Pastor Martin preached on Monday morning, to which I am preaching this morning that I hope will sustain what I intend to do with the same passage in much the same way. Please understand, that this is not a matter of correction, competition or crawling to the pastors here or pastor Martin in particular. Any of those approach would be dumb. I am not saying that I couldn’t do that, dumbest just comes about naturally. But I hope what we will at least see is the complementarity and confirmation of these things are taken and applied at different point, it will underline the richness and the unity of the word of God. That it will demonstrate as Phillips Brooks had a great deal right when he said, “preaching is truth through personality”, that you will get very much the same truth through a different personality, to a particular group of personalities. And also that given the counsel of the men who I asked, that when the Holy Spirit send you a wave, you don’t try to swim across it, you try to ride on it. Now I cannot say this with the same measure of certainty, but hope I am standing here and able to stand here today, that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to keep going with what I had originally prepared. You can consider this in some senses then an extended pastoral application covering much of the same territory with what we heard on Monday evening. I should also point out that I am already sadly but necessarily obliged to leave fairly early tomorrow. So if you do not see me it does not mean that the men, doesn’t necessarily mean, that the men here changed their minds and decided it would be nice if I left early.
So the survey, the same survey because it is the same bible, and the same passage about which Martin Lloyd Jones said that, “this is the most exalted and wonderful statement that Paul has ever made anywhere about the nature of the Christian church and her relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ”. In this passage, Ephesians chapter 5, the love of Christ is front and center. The love of Christ in Ephesians 5 is not the incidental love that illustrate the love of the husband to the wife. The love of the husband to the wife is the incidental love that illustrates the love Christ has to His church. The love of Christ, the love of God who is love, that love as it is known seen in the person of our Savior that is the love which sets the tone and establishes the pattern for every other love. Here is the heart of God revealed. Consider first the Fact of Christ’s love. We are told simply and absolutely that Christ loved the Church in Verse 25. Christ loved the Church, and that precedes the statement that He died for her. The love of Christ for the church is the beginning point. He does not love her because of who she is. He does not love her because of what she becomes. He loves her in her misery and poverty, in her emptiness and filthiness as portrayed in Ezekiel and chapter 16, He loves her before she is called, she is called because she is his beloved. He loves her in her absolute unloveliness and He therefore goes on loving her in her relative unloveliness. He sees her in her rags and vileness, all the horror, all the misery, all the filthiness, all that spiritual leprosy that belongs to her by nature is by no means hidden from His sight and yet He looks at her and loves her in the face of all her unworthiness, all her deficiencies, everything that makes her deserving of condemnation rather than love and delight. The love of Christ is a free love. It springs unbidding from His heart, unmerited and unearned. It’s an act of sovereign divine will, “Christ loved the Church”. And it is a gracious love, it is a love that bestows, a love that gives gifts rather than dispenses wages. It is not possible that the love of Christ for His church should be anything other than a free and gracious love. Christ loved His church, now we know.
Look at the form of Christ’s love. “Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her”. Love is tested by demonstration, love is revealed by behavior and the great characteristic of the love that Christ has for His church is sacrifice. His love unlike the so called love of this world. His love unlike the lust that too often parades as love, is an intent to give rather than a desire to have. Lust demands give yourself to me, love declares I give myself to you. It is a voluntary laying down of His life. And Paul has been building this into the letter to the Ephesians from the beginning. Verse 7 of chapter 1, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to His riches of His grace”, 2:13 “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near to the blood of Christ”, 5:2 “Walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a sweet smelling aroma”. The corporate expression of the individual declaration of the apostle in Galatians 2:20 “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me…” and as a consequence of that love “…gave Himself for me”. And each member of the Church individually, and the bride as a whole is His by virtue of redeeming blood. The blood that has been poured out on the cross as He died to pay the purchase price to have His people for Himself. For it was not while we were lovely, but while we were sinners that God demonstrated His love and Christ died for us. And that love that redeeming love unites us to Him. The church now has His life. These are wonders, this is the language of mystery that Paul has been dwelling on all the way through the letter to the Ephesians, this is the wonder God’s covenant love, God’s redeeming purposes which catch up and carry on the whole church, to the Praise of the glory of His grace. That we now possess the life that Christ now possesses. That the very same power that was at work in Him when He was raised from the dead, is the same power following precisely the same trajectory that is at work in every member of the whole redeemed church of Jesus Christ. And we are now seated in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. No we not, we are in our seats, here in Montville in New Jersey. Yes we are, but we are the saints who are in Ephesus in Christ Jesus. Always a dual location, the geographical time and space reality and the spiritual dimension, that whoever I am if in Christ, wherever I go and whatever circumstance, I am at one in the same time seated with Him on a throne in the heavenlies, in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. And so sharing that life with Him, I share too in all the glories that belong to Him. I enjoy all the privileges to which He is entitled to as my mediator. All the prospects that are His are mine also. All His servants are bound to serve me, as part of the church of Jesus Christ. And that’s not an arrogant declaration, that’s not boastful, that’s not chest beating. That’s face on the ground stuff. Why me? Why was I made to hear His voice and enter while there is room? When thousands make a wretched choice and rather starve than come. Why sinners like us? and yet united to Christ, brought from death to life , from darkness to light so that when the risen Lord Jesus can speak to the man that would eventually write these very words, He can ask him “Saul Saul, why are you persecuting me?” This is my body, this is my bride, these are my sheep, this is my people. Verse 23, Christ is head of the church and He is the savior of the body. Here is love vast as the ocean, loving-kindness as a flood, when the Prince of life our ransom shed for us His precious blood, who His love cannot remember, who can cease to sing His praise, He can never be forgotten throughout heaven’s eternal days, on the mount of crucifixion fountains open deep and wide, though the floodgates of God’s mercy flowed a vast gracious tide, grace and love like mighty rivers poured incessant from above and heaven’s peace and perfect justice kissed the guilty world in love. Its redeeming love, this love of Christ. It purchases by blood sacrifice, it is a sovereign love. It is a divine love that takes the initiative and acts with determined intent. “I love you and you are going to be mine”. And it is the uniting love, Verse 30, “We are members of His body of His flesh of His bones” that makes us one with Him and ensures that He as the head always is to be perceived as acting in connection with and for the sake of His people. Because He loves them.
Thirdly what is the fashion of His love. We are told that “He loved the church and gave Himself for her that He might sanctify and cleanse her by washing of water by the word” and then further on in verses 28 and following, “Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies, for he who loves his wife loves himself, for no one hates his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it just as the Lord does the church”. I think that there is in this section an over-arching temporal progression, we are moving from the past, “He loved her and gave Himself for her” into the present experience of the church, “that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. Now the death of Jesus Christ sets the church apart as His special treasure. But I see Pastor Martin’s O’Brien and I raise him one Eide(?). I think that the language here “He sanctifies having cleansed” allows us while recognizing the definitive reality that is at the root of this image to read into it a little of the progressive expression. He says for example that this is certainly the primary sense but it does not exclude the later sense. And as we heard on Monday, even if you don’t allow that construction to bear that weight then nourishing and the cherishing certain produces and provides what is left of that present experience of the church. But it certainly begins with Christ taking this unlovely one and bringing her to the realm of His love and setting her apart as His beloved one. Not just in terms of His intent but in terms of her experience and that does invariably give rise to this continuing reality. These are the immediate and the ongoing functions of gospel ministry. It is the preaching of the word. And again I think there may be some lesser reference to baptism, the primary reality is that regeneration that is secured under the ministry of the word of God, as the Holy Spirit makes the heart new and goes on to renew everything that flows out of that renewed heart. This is the effect of that ongoing preaching of the gospel. It’s what we heard yesterday. These are the things that ought to be front and center in the life of the congregation. So that not only the power and the punishment and the immediate pollution of sin addressed but the saints of God our soul ministered to that the outward reality of that gospel in every part of their redeemed humanity is made more and more evident. God’s holiness, man’s sinfulness, Christ’s redemption, the Spirit’s operation and the saint’s righteousness are the substance with which we are to deal if we are to see men and women sanctifies by the word and cleansed by the washing of water and to go on seeing them making progress in righteousness. Christ desires the perfection of His church, and so He works to bless her. This union is what gives to Him, and I am trying to use a careful phrase, a mediatorial completion. He is God in Himself, He needs nothing, but the church is still for Him as mediator the fullness of that which fills all in all. Again that’s something that God has made known. I think we have to bow before it even when we can’t fully understand it. And that reality works out in this very clearly expressed nourishing and cherishing. The love of Christ in His people invests in Her and preserves her. It demands nothing untoward of her and in no way debases her. Again this is the defining love and every other love must be compared to this, in order to see the failures and the imperfections. So there is this nourishing disposition and action, health, strength and growth. Caring for her, investing in her, doing all that He can to bring her to maturity of beauty and character. And then this watchful care, cherishing her, tenderly watching over her, guarding and keeping her. She is and always must be the apple of His eye. He loves her, and His purchase of her always leads to her enduring protection and increasing purification. That is the necessary consequence and the assured outworking of His love. Now it happens at different speeds, in different people, in different places, at different circumstances. Now we don’t trample on the shoot because it is not yet a tree. But brothers if there is no indication of Christ’s nourishing and cherishing of a particular member professing of His body it calls into question the fact of the purchase. Where there is no real and growing holiness it at best cast doubt upon whether or not there is any real union with Christ, who is the head of the church and her Savior, and when He loves He changes.
This then is an active love. It does not consist merely in poetic expressions and empty notions. Like the husband that send a beautiful Valentine’s Day card to his wife but then beats her because he got drunk the night after. It is a working love, and it is an expressed love. Now again if we love the way Christ loved then we would cultivate words and deeds, to express that love. Now again I don’t know if it is the same in this society, in the UK women talk and men grunt on a good day. Eloquence is a two syllable grunt. I gone from Uh to Uh huh, great! Good start! For some men that might be a move in the right direction. And some men are not gonna reach heights and it would be weird if they did of Shakespearean eloquence. But Christ talks to His bride, He speaks to her over and over and over again in words of sparkling clarity and tender affection. She has no reason to doubt His love for her with regard to the words He tells her over and over again. And He loves not in word only but in deed also. Deeds of unparallel and unparallelable kindness. So that we may say that having laid down His life for her, God having given His Son for us shall He not only with Him also freely give us all things. It is a free love, a gracious love, a redeeming and sovereign and uniting love. It is an active and expressed love.
It brings us to the Function of Christ’s love. “That He might present her to Himself a glorious church not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing”. So the trajectory carries us from the past through the present into the future. This love of Christ is carrying the church in a definite direction. It has always been His intention to make that which was unlovely, lovely through His love, that He might present her to Himself. That He might having invested in her in this way bring her to Himself. That He might present her to Himself a glorious church. The church is going to be characterized by glory as a consequence of Christ’s love toward her. That’s the root of everything that we heard expressed of the church on Monday evening. Why can we anticipate these things? Why are we looking forward to these things? What is the anchor of this reality? What is the motor that drives it? What is the fuel that fires the motor? It is the love of the Savior for the people upon whom He had set His sovereign and gracious affections, and He will suit His church. He will fit His church, to enjoy His presence and His blessing without any hindrance whatsoever, and it is His love which secures and assures all His appointed outcomes. And it is stated negatively, “without spot or blemish”, every stain removed, from the church as a whole and every individual member of her. And perhaps sometimes we shouldn’t, I think, but we do wonder, “you mean him too, that woman who sits over there, really? They are gonna be without spot or wrinkle or any such thing?” Yes! By virtue of Christ’s love, active and expressed, towards His people there will come a day when no sin or unworthiness, not the least shadow of a shred of iota of it left in the whole redeemed bride. There will be no signs of wear and tear in the church. We decay, but the church of Jesus Christ is ever blooming and blossoming and there is no decay that would be seen there will be no strain but she will come to her Groom as a blooming bride. Positively holy without blemish, blameless and righteous, characterized by the perfection of that beauty in which God Himself delights. So that all of that imagery in Psalm 45, all of that beauty of Revelation 19:21 of the bride not just clean but decked in the white garments which her groom delights and be presented to the Savior upright and pure a bride fitted for her husband. So not only is her joyful but so also is His, as He brings her to Himself. It is this loving power that scrubs and purifies, that adorns and beautifies, as God completes that work that He has begun until the day of the Lord Jesus Christ. A process that is going to confound everything that this world thinks about us now. Nothing left to criticize that which is only to be admired. It is an overcoming love this love of the Savior. It successfully addresses everything that is unlovely. Not all at once, it could, but what does not remains in His sovereign wisdom and dispensation, but it will one day complete the task to the praise of His glorious grace. It is a purposeful love, there is nothing that happens to any church local, to any member of that church, that is not the expression of the purposeful love of her head and Savior. I don’t understand how that works but that’s what I need to tell people. When they don’t understand how anything works. That’s what they need to grasp, and brothers they need to grasp it before they hit the crisis. They need to know that before, I think it’s, Is it Exodus 6, I’ll give you the sense Moses reports that the people of Israel couldn’t hear him because of their grief. Ever try to minister to someone in their grief, in their pain, in their loss, in their sorrow? They can’t hear you. Grief has deafened them. They needed to know before, they needed to hear over and over again of the love of Christ toward them. So that sustains them in their loss. You know, perhaps someone of you guys Paul Wolf’s book on his experience of suffering cancer. He says there that it wasn’t the sermons he heard after the diagnosis that sustained him for that battle, It was all the sermons he heard over the years before that diagnosis, that’s what sustained him, that truth, that had been packed in, pressed down over time. It’s purposeful, it’s moving to its appointed end and it will complete the task. God is love. And you don’t need to say BUT. You might need to say AND, you might need to say SO, you ought to say THEREFORE, but I think we need to be careful before we just say that lazy BUT. We know that love is badly defined, we know that love is carnally and crassly defined. We know that the temptation that we and others have is to read our petty, poor, perverted expressions of love and to project them up unto God in Christ. But it is our task to define and explain and portray the great love of God in Christ and to say, “everything else fails and is flawed in comparison to that, that is love”, and you Christ of Christ, you are beloved with that love. Somebody told me the other day about a man who came to the church, not after awhile he said, “It would be great if God were more like Jesus”. You can imagine what the man said to him. That’s the whole point! God is just like Jesus, because Jesus reveals God to man. If you have seen Him, you’ve seen the father, What is God like? He is like Him. Where do I see His love and His mercy and His favor? Where do I see God’s just and holy and pure? Not in two different places. But in the one and the same man Christ Jesus. At the one and the same point preeminently as He lays down His life for the church, rises again on her behalf and goes on loving her until she is made lovely by His love. Brothers, until you and I are clear and confident on this fact we will fail to communicate it to the people who need to hear it. If you got a perpetual BUT with regard to the love of God in Christ in your heart then you will never be able to properly assure the saints that they are beloved of their Savior. When we communicate this, we communicate, we communicate a love that is first of all enticing, properly in the best sense, it’s attractive, it draws sinners to the Savior. There is a reason why He was called friends of sinners. He never really, He didn’t say, “I love you, BUT”. He said, “Come to me” now He never them where they were. But He always started where they were. He loved them as they were and then brought them to where they ought to be. And to those who were dead in their sins this is precisely the love that they need. Not the love that says, “When I think I like you” “When you’ve done enough for me”. Not the love that is demanding in that sense. Not the love that is debasing and belittling and destroying, but the love that says, “you come as you are and I will show you the kind of love that you cannot begin to imagine”. A love that loves us as we are but never leaves us as we are, is just the love that a sin wretched sinner needs to know about. Unless you can proclaim it they will stay away from the only one that can save them from their sins! They need to know that they can come and be accepted in the beloved! Not on their behalf and but on His behalf, because He laid down His life for them. This brothers is what allows us to preach the gospel to sinners. Do you ever find yourself mentally categorizing the people who are likely to get converted? Too unclean, too far away, not dressed properly, too many tattoos, too much body jewelry, not the right kind of smell, wrong kind of haircut, wrong kind of sin, wouldn’t fit in this congregation. Christ loves without regard to the perceived unloveliness of his chosen people. And we must be fearfully careful, lest we impose barriers and boundaries upon the love of Christ which He Himself has not put in place. This is the love that allows us to declare the gospel full and free to every man and woman, boy and girl in the confidence that Christ can love anyone whom He chooses and He will and does. It is an enticing love.
It’s an engaging love. And it’s not just the husband, that the illustration we get used here. That’s the application that is made immediately here, but again we have to appreciate that love in the church is always a reaction. We love as those who have been loved. We will only ever replicate what we have received. And I believe it is Sinclair Ferguson that says that, “We tend to be towards others what we believe God has been to us”. Why are we not the loving people that we ought to be? Is it because we have learned a perverted or truncated undermined, over-refined kind of love? That we have not modeled our love after divine as it really is. I am going to love others as I have been loved. My love to God is going to be a reflection of my understanding of God’s love toward me and my pity and my compassion and my affection and its demonstration and expression in regards to those who are still lost and those who are being found, is going to be a reflection of my perception of the love that I have been loved. And if this is not explained and applied, then the people of God will not love the way that God loves.
It is a comforting love, because it assures us of our acceptance. It gives peace and rest to the troubled soul. Now there are some reasons more legitimate why saints lack assurance. I think it was Roger Nicoll, I think I am right in saying, there was a discussion going on in a conference once about assurance and the question was raised, whether or not a Christian who is going on in a known course of sin without repentance might be expected to lose their assurance. I hope I am not doing him a disservice when I say, I think it was Roger Nicol that answered before anybody else, “I hope so!” We are not entitled to assurance as the purchased bride of Jesus Christ. But how many of our people lack assurance because we may have given them reason to make them doubt the love of Christ toward them. There ought to be outside of the assaults of Satan and may yet be the sovereign acts of God as a father no reason in our preaching a pastoring why any of God’s people can say, “I’m not sure that Jesus loves me”.
It is a liberating love. Liberates the people of God from the pressures of legalism. The instinct that says “I have to get right and stay right by virtue of what I am and what I do” We cannot oblige God to love us and our best efforts remain tainted by our continued sin. But if Christ loved me in all my filthy and sin and misery, then I don’t need to get right by virtue of what I have done, and if in this sense Christ is going to keep loving me despite what I still am, then it does not lie in me but I rest on him, and I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to perform, because He has said, “I love you”, regardless of what I am in myself. But the other side of that coin, of course, is that this is a constraining love against all the temptation to license and one great and powerful antidote to temptation ought to be this, “I have been purchased at a price, He loves me! He loves me! And He has loved me to make me lovely like Him and for Him! How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” There are other reasons why we ought not to sin. The fact that God has said so is not an illegitimate one but again when we think of the motives, as we think of the pressures, when we think of those moments when we or other are tethering on the brink and Satan and circumstances are pushing us and pushing us, and we’ve got our fingernails on the edge and we think “I’m going again”, “No! Because I’m loved! And I will not offend Him who loved me and gave Himself for me” The love of Christ towards his people is a powerful break and restraint upon sin. I am the purchase of love, I am bought by a price, I have known liberty because of that love, no wish to offend Him who’s made me love Him.
It is an encouraging love, in the face of all the demands and the dangers that the church of Christ feels. This is wherever we fall back again and again when all things seem against us, to drive us to our knees, when everything seems to be mounting up against us, when the church of Jesus Christ seem to be no more than a splattering candle in the great carnal storm of ungodliness. When the individual saint seem to be no more than a mere spark, as the waves of sin wash around and pressure and temptation to conform, bothers Christ loves His church! And that flame cannot be extinguished! And that spark will never go out! however bruised the reed. However close to extinction the flax, however stumbling the true saint, however overcome and under pressure the church of Jesus Christ, we may fall back again and again on this sure foundation. We are beloved for Christ’s sake, It’s stirring. Why do people fight wars? Because of love, good wars, if there can be such a thing. When the forces of darkness begin to sweep over, what is the rallying cry? Men for your country, Men for your wife, Men for your children, If for no one and for nothing else, fight because of love. Do you want to see the church of Christ energized? Do you long to see people who say in effect, “here are I am, send me” to use Fuller’s language. Do you wonder what it would take somebody or anybody ask, “what can I do?” rather than, “What must I do?” Preach the love of God in Christ. This is what stirs up, draws out the heart. Why do we go? Not because we have to but because we can, we serve the best of masters. We serve our beloved head and master and Savior, what do you want me to do? That’s the question of a man who has just been overcome with the love of the Savior toward him. And it’s all too easy to shepherd with the club and the whip rather than the rod and the staff. The club and the whip could get the flock moving but they stop moving as soon as the back’s turned, and then they need a bigger club and a longer whip, and you’re driving, driving, driving. But if they know that Christ loves them, if they are persuaded of that under the sweet influences of the Holy Spirit then they will go readily.
It is an uplifting love, points us toward our final hope, because even if this life robs me of my life here, it cannot take from me that life which I have in Christ. There is nothing that happens to anyone of the people of God whom we serve, that would in anyway separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. He has bought us, He will keep us. And you can look any child of God in the eyes and you can assure them “in the midst of darkness and sorrows, He loved you, He gave Himself for you and He will not let you go and that will carry you to the very gates of death and will take you safely over the river and it will bring you safely to the celestial city”.
It is, finally, a compelling love. This used to be our sense and our conviction as the friends of the bridegroom if I can adopt that language. I know it refers specifically to the Baptist but there is a sense in which as gospel ministers we are the servants of the bride for His sake, with the friends of the bridegroom our joy is not full till that day He has her in His arms. We are bond-slaves, compelled by Christ’s love for His church. And that I hope to pick up in the second hour. Let us pray.
Eternal God and Gracious, Loving, Heavenly Father, will you forgive us for our feeble and low estimations of your love in Christ. Will you forgive us for all our poor and petty expressions of the love that you have for your people, O Jesus will you forgive us for every unloving feeling of heart toward your blood bought children. Holy Spirit please do not depart from us on account of our unloving heart but show to us more of that precious divine love in Christ, that being loved we may love you our triune God and loving You we may learn to love as You have loved those who are still dead in their sins and to love those who are brought into the fold, that we may serve faithfully and fruitfully ever more to the praise and glory of your glorious grace, we pray this in the name of the great bridegroom himself Jesus Christ. Amen.