The Father

The Divine Love in Us

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father, The Holy Spirit 5 Comments

“And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” – John 17:26

God does not love us because we know Him, for He loved us before we knew Him, even as Paul speaks of “His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins.” Jesus has not come to set His Father’s love upon the chosen. Oh, no; He did not even die with that object, for the Father’s love was upon the chosen from everlasting. “The Father Himself loveth you” was always true. Christ did not die to make His Father loving, but because His Father is loving: the atoning blood is the outflow of the very heart of God toward us. So do not make any mistake. Our Lord speaks not of the divine love in itself, but in us. This is not the eternal love of God towards us of which we are now reading, but that love in us. We are inwardly to feel the love which proceeds from the Father, and so to have it in us. We are to have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. It is to be recognized by us, felt in us, made the subject of inward joy; this it is that our Lord wishes to produce, that the love of God may be in us, dwelling in our hearts, a welcome guest, the sovereign of our souls.

The love of the Father towards Jesus springs up like a crystal fountain, and then the sparkling drops fall and overflow, as you have seen the fountains do, and we are the cups into which this overflowing love of God towards Christ Jesus flows, and flows till we, too, are full. The inward love so much desired for us by our Lord is…the Father’s love transplanted into the soil of these poor hearts, and becoming our love to Jesus. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

God’s Very Essence is Love

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father Leave a comment

And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. – 1 John 4:16

God is love, and there is a something about love which always wins love. When love puts on her own golden armour, and bares her sword bright with her own unselfishness, she goeth on conquering and to conquer. Let a man once apprehend that God is love, that this is God’s very essence, and he must at once love God. I do not mean merely “apprehend” that God is love in the cold intellect; but when this heart begins to glow and burn with that divine revelation, then straightway the spirit is joined unto the Lord, and rests with delight in the great Father of spirits. Love knits and binds. Oh to feel more of its uniting power…Everything in God is lovely, and there is no trait in His character that is otherwise than lovely. All the lovelinesses that can be conceived are heaped up in God without the slightest admixture or adulteration. He is love altogether, wholly, and emphatically. Oh, surely our Lord and Master was wise when He fed His people’s love upon such meat as this.

Just think for a minute. God is holy. To a holy mind there is nothing in the world, there is nothing in heaven more beautiful than holiness. We read of the beauties of holiness; for to a soul that is purified, holiness is superlatively lovely. Now, beauty wins love, and consequently when Jesus Christ makes known His holy Father, and shows us in His life and in His death the holiness of the Ever-blessed, then our heart is won to the Father. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

God’s Infinite Goodness

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father Leave a comment

“…there is none good but one, that is, God.” – Mark 10:18

“His mercy endures forever.” – (many scripture verses)

We learn from our Lord Jesus that God is good. “There is none good but one: that is God.” How inexpressibly good He is! There is no goodness but what comes from God. His name, “God” is but short for “good,” and all the good things that we receive in this life, and for the life to come, are but enlargements of His blessed name. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” Blessings enjoyed by us are streams that flow from the fountain head of God’s infinite goodness to the sons of men. A man cannot help loving God when once he knows Him to be good, for all men love that which they apprehend to be good to them. A man says, “Gold is good; rest is good; fame is good;” and therefore he seeks after these things, and when he comes to know that God is good, oh, then his spirit follows hard after Him. He cannot help but love that which he is persuaded is in the highest sense good. The soul that knows the name of the Lord rejoices at the very mention of Him.

Note how the prophet saith,”Who is a God like unto Thee, passing by transgression?” He does not say, “Who is a man like unto Thee?” for none among our race can for a moment be compared with Him; but even if the gods of the heathen were gods, none of them could be likened unto the Lord for mercy…”His mercy endureth for ever.” Free grace and pardoning love sensibly known in the soul will win your hearts unto God for ever, so that you shall be His willing servants as long as you have any being. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

“Righteous Father” – a Father Full of Love

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father Leave a comment

“O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee.”- John 17:25

This is the name which we most need to know-“righteous Father.” Observe the singular combination. Righteous and yet a Father. “Righteous”: to us poor sinners that is a word of terror when first we hear it. “Father,”-oh, how sweet. That is a word of good cheer even to us prodigals; but we are afraid to lay hold upon it, for our sins arise, and conscience protests that God must be righteous, and punish sin. Our joy begins when we see the two united: “righteous Father,”-a Father full of love, and nothing but love, to His people, and yet righteous as a Judge, as righteous as if He were no Father. Dealing out His righteousness with stern severity as the Judge of all the earth must do, and yet a Father at the same time. I do protest that I never did love God at all, nor could I embrace Him in my affections, till I understood how He could be just and yet the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus: how, in a word, He could be the “righteous Father.” That satisfied my conscience and my heart at the same time, for my conscience said, It is well. God hath not put away sin without a sacrifice, and hath not winked at sin nor waived His justice in order to indulge His mercy, but He remains just as He ever was-the same thrice holy God who will by no means spare the guilty. He hath laid the punishment of our sins upon Christ; He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. And all this He has done that He might act to us as a Father, and save His own children from the result of their transgressions. He has given His only begotten Son to die in our stead that many sons might be brought to glory through Him. It is at the cross we understand this riddle. Here we see the righteous Father. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

Christ’s Aim: Making Known the Father

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, The Father, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

“And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” – John 17:26

Are you growing in knowledge, my brothers and sisters? My labour is lost if you are not growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ…That little knowledge which you received by grace when you found “life in a look at the Crucified One” has saved you…A look at Christ saves; but oh, it is the look into Christ that wins the heart’s love and holds it fast and binds us to Him as with fetters of gold. We ought every day to be adding something to this inestimably precious store, that as we are known of God so we may know God, and become thereby transformed from glory unto glory through His Spirit.

Are you not thankful for this blessed word of the Lord Jesus: “I will declare it…I will make it known”? He did do so at His resurrection, when He taught His people things they knew not before; but He did so much more after He had ascended up on high when the Spirit of God was given. “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” And now to-day in the hearts of His people He is daily teaching us something that we do not know. All our experience tends that way. When the Spirit of God blesses an affliction to us, it is one of the Saviour’s illuminated books out of which we learn something more of the Father’s name, and consequently come to love Him better: for that is the thing Christ aims at. He would so make known the Father, that the love wherewith the Father hath loved Him may be in us, and that He Himself may be in us. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

Being Taught of the Son of God

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father, The Holy Spirit 8 Comments

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” – John 14:26

O beloved, it is not knowledge that you and I pick up as a matter of book learning that will ever bring out our love to the Father: it is knowledge given us by Christ through His Spirit. It is not knowledge communicated by the preacher alone which will bless you; for however much he may be taught of God Himself, he cannot preach to the heart unless the blessed Spirit of God comes and takes of the things that are spoken, and reveals them and makes them manifest to each individual heart, so that in consequence it knows the Lord. Jesus said, “O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee,” and you and I would have been in the same condition, strangers to God, without God and without hope in the world, if the Spirit of God had not taken of divine things and applied them to our souls so that we are made to know them. Every living word of knowledge is the work of the living God. If you only know what you have found out for yourself, or picked up by your own industry apart from Jesus, you know nothing aright: it must be by the direct and distinct teaching of God the Holy Ghost that you must learn to profit. Jesus Christ alone can reveal the Father. He Himself said, “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” He that knows not Christ knows not the Father; but when Jesus Christ reveals Him, ah! then we do know Him after a special, personal, peculiar, inward knowledge. This knowledge brings with it a life and a love with which the soul is not puffed up, but built up. By such knowledge we grow up into Him in all things who is our Head, being taught of the Son of God.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm

The Food of Love to God

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Father 2 Comments

The food of love to God- what is it? It is knowledge:

“I have made known unto them Thy name, and will make it known.”- John 17:26

We cannot love a God whom we do not know: a measure of knowledge is needful to affection. However lovely God may be, a man blind of soul cannot perceive Him, and therefore is not touched by His loveliness. Only when the eyes are opened to behold the loveliness of God will the heart go out towards God who is so desirable an object for the affections. Brethren, we must know in order to believe; we must know in order to hope; and we must especially know in order to love. Hence the great desirableness that you should know the Lord, and His great love which passeth knowledge. You cannot reciprocate love which you have never known, even as a man cannot derive strength from food which he has not eaten. Till first of all the love of God has come into your heart, and you have been made a partaker of it, you cannot rejoice in it or return it. Therefore our Lord took care to feed His disciples’ hearts upon the Father’s name. He laboured to make the Father known to them. This is one of His great efforts with them, and He is grieved when He sees their ignorance, and has to say to one of them, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?” Study much, then, the word of God: be diligent in turning the pages of Scripture and in hearing God’s true ministers, that the flame of love within your hearts may be revived by the fuel of holy knowledge which you place upon it. Pile on the logs of sandal wood, and let the perfumed fires burn before the Lord. Heap on the handfuls of frankincense and sweet odours of sacred knowledge, that on the altar of your heart there may always be burning the sacred flame of love to God in Christ Jesus.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1667.cfm