Does Jesus love me?

Has such a thought gained a lodging-place in your heart? Have you been assailed by a bit of distrust of His love and His care? Look at verse 5 of our chapter, “Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.” There is something very touching in that little parenthesis. To me there is something very sweet in this. He loved each of the sisters, and they are named personally. Get hold of this. He loves you. You will never come right and everything will appear wrong if you do not. It is not a kind of general idea, He loves us; but this, He loves ME. It was Paul who wrote, and I know his heart glowed as he wrote it, “The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Has it been wrought into your soul that you are the object of His deepest and tenderest affection? If so, rest in this, perfect love always does the best for its object. That will help you through many a difficulty. That will comfort you in your heavy sorrow. You know this world is not a fair garden, it is a vale of tears, and more than that, it is the place where all the consequences of man's sin are necessarily met with as we go through it, and consequently if you have not got the sense of the love of Christ in the difficulties and disappointments and sorrows that come upon you, you will find you will lose your balance, and you will be thrown into want of confidence in God. Your soul will chill down and get entangled in the world; but if you have got this in your heart, “I am loved by Him with a perfect love,” you will be kept. No matter what happens, no matter what comes, and if the most crushing sorrow that you can know is rolled in upon you, you will know how to drop at His feet and learn the comfort you never learn except in sorrow, and you will learn the love of Christ then as in no other way.

Yes, the love of Christ for each one individually is a fact to be cherished in the heart with holy confidence. We must not lose the sense of His love for us each one individually. It was what John rested in at all times, for he opens his Gospel by showing us the Son in the bosom of the Father (1:18), he afterwards shows us in chapter 13 a disciple in the bosom of the Son, and speaks of himself as the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” He does not style himself “The disciple who loved Jesus!” No, he abides in the joy that Jesus loves him. How different, as we have said, to speaking of loving Christ, or having affection for Christ. No, it is in the love of Jesus he finds strength and cheer: Paul, too, approximates closely to John when he says, “The Son of God … loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). That is the constraining power in which we are to continue, always remembering whose love it is the love of no less a Person than the great and glorious Son of God “the Christ, who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen” (Rom. 9:5, N.Tr.). The more we learn of His greatness and glory, the more will His love be enhanced to our adoring hearts, as we think of such an One stooping to suffering, shame and death to make us His for ever.

Accordingly in Galatians 2:20, if we turn now to the next Epistle after those to the Corinthians, Christ "loved me and gave Himself for me." Impossible to have language more individual. It is not merely the general truth that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Here the soul, now believing, is entitled to claim the love of Christ specially, "He loved me and gave Himself for me." Are you entitled to preach this to an unbeliever? No scripture warrants or admits of such a licence.

And now a promise or two from Himself, and I have done. In John 15:9, He has left us this precious word: "As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you; continue ye in My love." He gives us, as the only measure of the love wherewith He loves us, the Father's love for Himself, His well-beloved Son. Well may we say, "it passeth knowledge." And His is an unchanging love — "the same yesterday" — when first He set His heart upon us, dead in our sins — "today, and for ever." Our apprehension of it may change, but His love never can. Yet He wants that it should not be so with us. He desires that we should walk in the full enjoyment of it all our way in the wilderness — "Continue ye in My love;" and so He says, "If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love." Oh, beloved, what an incentive to obedience is here for us — the unclouded enjoyment of His love! Does His face seem hidden at times? Ah! it is not that He has changed, but there has been some departure of heart from Him on our part, some unfaithfulness. His will has lost its proper place in our terribly self-willed minds, and for the time we have been found in disobedience. Yes, it is in proportion as we walk in subjection to Him, that we enjoy that love, and disobedience mars it all.

The Lord opens this part of His discourse with the words: — "As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you: abide in my love (N. Tn.). Thus, the first great outstanding mark of the Christian company is that it is loved by the Lord, and the desire of His heart is that believers should walk together in the realisation of His love, and thus answer to His words, "Abide in my love." The Lord gives the love of the Father to Himself as the measure and manner of His love to believers. The Lord speaks, not of the Father's love to the Son in eternity, but the love of the Father to the Son incarnate — to Jesus as Man. This was a love that entered into all the sorrows of His path, all the enmity He had to meet, and the sufferings He had to endure. In the same way we are loved by Christ with a love that enters into all our trials, feels for us in perfect sympathy in all our sorrows, and, in our case bears with us in all our failures, and restores our souls when we have wandered far from Him. Whatever we have to meet we can count upon a love that never changes and will continue to the end. In the conscious sense of this love the Lord would have us to continue.

The exhortation to abide in His love leads to the second great mark that the Lord desires to be found in the Christian company. He would have His people marked by obedience to His commands. His words are: "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept My Father's commandments, and abide in His love" (V. 10). Very happily one has said, "The love of Christ rests on the way of obedience, and shines along the path of His commandments. The keeping His commandments does not create the love, any more than walking in sunny places creates the sunshine; and accordingly the exhortation is not to seek or merit or obtain the love, but to remain in it by continuing in the state and life to which alone it belongs."

“What love with His can vie?” “One of you shall betray me,” said the Lord, and the disciple whom Jesus loved seemed to enter into the full meaning of it all, for he reclined upon Jesus' bosom. It was as though He said, “Lord, I cannot trust my heart, or depend upon my love to you, but I can trust Your heart and I can find perfect rest in the love that beats in Your bosom for me.” And the supper invites us, and encourages us to act as he acted, so that we also may call ourselves “the disciple whom Jesus loves.” The love of Christ is not measured by our response to it, it does not change as ours changes, but it will continue in all its strength “till He come.” What a resting place is His bosom! What solace and joy His love yields! and that it might be ever fresh before us the supper has been given to us; and that we might clearly see that it is not a love dependent upon our faithfulness it was instituted on the night of the betrayal — the same night.

Who shall Separate? — Nor is this all. In the presence of hostile powers, exposed to the malice of enemies, battling with circumstances, facing death perhaps, and enduring hardships, a third triumphant challenge is boldly thrown out; but like the others to find no one to take it up. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter" (35, 36). What answer is there to this? We may well listen to one who was competent to reply, having graduated very high in the school of suffering. "Nay," he says, "in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us (37)." Circumstances, then, however adverse, cannot separate us from the love of Christ, nor powers, we next learn, from the love of God. And here again Paul, so competent to speak, acquaints the saints in Rome with his firm persuasion as to it. "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers" (for in such order we should read these clauses) "nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (38, 39)." Bold yet sober language, evidencing the confidence of faith, very different from vain boasting, or bombastic utterances, I am persuaded, writes St. Paul. He had proved what God's love was to him in the past. He could count on it throughout his whole career. No power had deprived him of its enjoyment, no power could, he was sure. And if he were to be alone, as at times he was, that love would reach him and sustain his heart — the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, the love of Him who gave His Son for Paul. What creature can hinder the outflow of God's love to the objects of it? Creatures however formidable, what are they when opposed to God?

Here not only have we Christ presented in the full extent of His work from His death on the cross through resurrection to His presence and activity of intercession for us at God's right hand, as the ground for the challenge, Who shall sever us from the love of Christ? but the difficulties and perils and sufferings for us along the road are mustered and arrayed in all their strength in order to prove its fidelity and unfathomable depth. Certainly, if we now, as the godly of old and ere long in the latter day, taste somewhat the bitterness of the way and the obstacles the enemy puts before us, Christ drank that cup and more to the dregs. Not only did He drink what was and could be His alone; but which of our afflictions was He a stranger to? Deeper by far, and felt according to the competency of His person to estimate and suffer, they became only the demonstration of His perfect love to us, Himself all the while the faithful witness. Christ who is risen and on high has been in them all, having gone down incomparably lower than the lowest of us. None of these then shall separate us from the love of Christ.

How full of meaning are the "go" and the "come" of this short sentence. "Go call thy husband" speaks of the sin of her life; "Come hither" tells of the grace of His heart. The "go" seems to say, "Your sins put you at an infinite distance from Me": the "come" seems to say, "My love draws you near to Me". Oh precious Saviour, who knows the worst about us, yet bids us come to Him! Where, indeed, shall we find a friend like Jesus? Where is there another in all the universe who knows all that we have ever done, and yet loves us, and, loving us bids us come to Him? What a revelation is this of divine love!

Why not then, my fellow-sinner, be entreated to come to Jesus now — just now? If so guilty, so far down in the social scale that thou art ashamed of thyself in the presence of others — yet thou mayest freely, trustingly, come to Jesus. Thou wilt be welcome there. And rest assured of a present pardon, salvation and acceptance through His precious blood. Such was the experience of the woman that was a sinner and of the penitent thief on the cross; and such may be thine. He who died on the cross for thee and me is surely fit to be trusted. And say, — would He have died for us if He had not loved us? Oh! lift thine eyes to that cross and see His unquenchable love bleeding there! Seekest thou another sign save the sign of the cross? God forbid! The great reality in the universe is the love of Jesus! Heaven, earth and hell, for a time, were all against the sinner's Substitute. All refuge failed Him. (Ps. 142:4.) But then it was that His love burst forth through every weight and pressure, in all its native strength and glory. Many waters could not quench His love, no floods could drown it, though He could say in spirit, "The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head." (Jonah 2:5.) Again and again we would ask thee, Wilt thou, dost thou value the love that willingly passed through all this suffering for the chief of sinners? And with what end in view, thinkest thou? That they might one day share with Him His throne in glory. Do lean all thy weight on Jesus — trust all to Him. His eye can never grow dim — His arm can never become feeble — His heart can never turn cold. For time and for eternity, thou art only safe and happy in trusting Him.