Everlasting Love by John McDuff
1864 How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! I have loved
you with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness
have I drawn you, Jeremiah 31.3 Here we have an everlasting thought
of God, in the beginning, before ever the earth was. Believer,
travel back in imagination to the ages of the past, before
the trance of eternity was broken by any visible manifestation
of power, before one temple was erected in space, before one
angel waved his wing, or one note was heard of Seraph's song.
when God inhabited alone these sublime solitudes. Then there
was a thought of you, and that thought was love. think of the
sovereignty of that love. He says not, You have loved me
with your poor earthly love, therefore have I drawn you. No,
no, it is from nothing in you. No foreseen goodness on your
part. Grace is the reason for all he
has done. God, who is rich in mercy, for
his great love with which he loved us, I will have mercy,
is his own declaration, on whom I will have mercy. Jacob That
cunning, scheming, crafty youth! Jacob I have loved, but Esau
I hated. Manasseh That miserable man who
has defiled his crown, dishonored his throne, and deluged Jerusalem
with blood, I have loved. That dying thief, fresh from
a life of infamy, breathing out his blasphemies on a felon's
cross, I have loved. And why, let each of us ask,
am I not a Cain or a Judas? Why am I not a wrecked and stranded
vessel like thousands before me? Here is the reason. Yes, I have loved you. Before you had one thought of
me. Yes, when your thoughts were
those of hatred, rebellion, and enmity, my thoughts toward you
were thoughts of love. And that sovereign love, as it
is from everlasting, so is it to everlasting. Endless in duration,
enduring as eternity. The love of the creature is but
of yesterday. It may be gone tomorrow, dried
like a summer brook when most need it. spot. The love of God is fed from the
glacier summits, the everlasting hills. We may estimate its intensity,
when the Savior could utter regarding it such a prayer as this, that
the love with which you have loved Me may be in them. O amid the often misgivings of
my own doubting heart, with its frames and feelings as vacillating
as a shifting sand, let me delight to ponder this precious thought,
the long line of unbroken love, every link love, connecting the
eternity that is past with the eternity to come. God thinking
of me before the birth of time, even then mapping out all my
future happiness and heavenly bliss, and standing now, with
the hoarded love of that eternity in His heart, seeking therewith
to draw me. It is the exceeding riches of
His grace and kindness towards us through Christ Jesus, which
is the moral gravitation power of the cross, by which His true
people have ever been drawn. I, if I be lifted up from the
earth, will draw all men unto myself. Draw me, Lord, and I
will run after you. Show me your lovingkindness,
thus enshrined and manifested in your dear Son. Constrain me
to love you in Him, because you have first loved, and so loved
me. How priceless is your unfailing
love! Both high and low among men find
refuge in the shadow of your wings.