19th Day
The Wonderful Love
Even as the Father hath loved Me, I also have loved you.—Ver. 9.
Here Christ leaves the language of parable, and speaks plain out of the Father. Much as the parable could teach, it could not teach the lesson of love. All that the vine does for the branch, it does under the compulsion of a law of nature: there is no personal living love to the branch. We are in danger of looking to Christ as a Saviour and a supply of every need, appointed by God, accepted and trusted by us, without any sense of the intensity of personal affection in which Christ embraces us, and our life alone can find its true happiness. Christ seeks to point us to this.
And how does He do so? He leads us once again to Himself, to show us how identical His own life is with ours. Even as the Father loved Him, He loves us. His life as vine dependent on the Father, was a life in the Father’s love; that love was His strength and His joy: in the power of that Divine love resting on Him He lived and died. If we are to live like Him, as Branches to be truly like our Vine, we must share in this too. Our life must have its breath and being in a Heavenly Love as much as His. What the Father’s love was to Him, His love will be to us. If that love made Him the True Vine, His love can make us True Branches. Even as the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you.
Even as the Father hath loved Me. And how did the Father love Him? The infinite desire and delight of God to communicate to the Son all He had Himself, to take the Son into the most complete equality with Himself, to live in the Son and have the Son live in Him, this was the love of God to Christ. It is a mystery of glory of which we can form no conception, we can only bow and worship as we try to think of it. And with such a love, with this very same love, Christ longs in an infinite desire and delight to communicate to us all He is and has, to make us partakers of His own nature and blessedness, to live in us and have us live in Himself.
And now, if Christ loves us with such an intense, such an infinite Divine love, what is it that hinders it triumphing over every obstacle and getting full possession of us? The answer is simple. Even as the love of the Father to Christ, so His love to us, is a Divine mystery, too high for us to comprehend or attain to by any effort of our own. It is only the Holy Spirit who can shed abroad and reveal in its all-conquering power without intermission this wonderful love of God in Christ. It is the vine itself must give the branch its growth and fruit by sending up its sap. It is Christ Himself must by His Holy Spirit dwell in the heart; then shall we know and have in us the love that passeth knowledge.
As the Father loved Me, so have I loved you. Shall we not draw near to the personal living Christ, and trust Him, and yield all to Him, that He may love this love into us, so that, just as He knew and rejoiced every hour: The Father loveth Me, we too may live in the unceasing consciousness: As the Father loved Him, so He loves me?
As the Father loved me, so have I loved you. Dear Lord! I am only beginning to apprehend how exactly the life of the Vine is to be that of the Branch too. Thou art the Vine, because the Father loved thee, and poured His love through Thee. And so Thou lovest me, and my life as Branch is to be like Thine, a receiving and a giving out of heavenly love.