ur Apostle would concur heartily in the great text which was the theme
of a recent sermon. Paul said, 'God establishes His love towards us, in
that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.' John says, 'Herein
is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son
to be the propitiation for our sins.'

So the Cross of Christ is the one demonstration that God loved us.
Looking to it we can say, with a great modern teacher:--

'So the All-great were the All-loving too,
So through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying "Oh! heart I made; a heart beats here,
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself;
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of Mine;
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me, who have died for thee."'

II. Here we have the ultimate word as to our religion.

'We love Him, because He first loved us.' There is a bridge wanted
between these two, and the bridge is supplied abundantly in this letter,
in entire harmony with the teaching of the rest of the New Testament.
Much has been said, and profitably said, with reference to the
modification of the general type of Christian teaching in the writings
respectively of Paul, Peter, James, and John. I thankfully recognise the
diversities. They are not divergencies; they are perfectly
complementary, and may all be made to harmonise. This Apostle of love
has also declared to us how it comes that the love which burns at the
centre of things, where there is a heart, kindles a responding love away
out on the circumference of things, where there are men with hearts; and
the bridge is--'We have known and believed the love that God hath to
us.' So says John. And Paul, the Apostle of faith, who sometimes seems
as if his only conception of the link of union between God and man was,
on the part of man, faith, responds when he speaks of a faith which
worketh, comes to energetic operation, through the love which it has
kindled.

So we come to this, that a simple trust in the love of God, as
manifested in Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the only thing which will so
deal with man's natural self-regard and desire to make himself his own
object and centre, as to substitute for that the victorious love to God.
You cannot love God, unless you believe that He loves you. You will
never be absolutely sure of that, unless you have learned it from the
Cross of Christ. You will not respond with the love that He de