In Psalm 31, verse 23, David
said, O love the Lord, all ye his Saints, for the Lord preserveth
the faithful, and plentifully rewardeth the proud doer. It's true that when one is brought
to love the Lord Jesus Christ, he desires to see others love
him too. And so David, with a heart full
of the love of God, now exhorts and pleads and encourages the
Saints to love the Lord. There are three things that are
embraced in that scripture here. In connection with love, we have
a love of complacency, we have a love of benevolence, We have
a love of gratitude. A love of complacency simply
means that you have a love which delights in the person of God. When you are brought to know
who the living God really is and what he is, you can't help
but bless him for who he is and what he is, and delight yourself
in him. So then there is no true religion. without really delighting in
the true God, even our Lord Jesus Christ. We must take pleasure
in the Almighty. But then there is not only that
love of complacency wherein we delight in the person of our
God who has been brought to know him, but there is the love of
benevolence, that is, which wishes good to God. You know, our Lord
taught us that in the prayer that he taught us to pray. He
said, when you pray, you say, Our Father which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name. That is, you pray for God first.
You wish God well. You say good things about him. When you love God and you bless
him, you simply wish him well. You hope that his will And his
desire may come to pass in your life and in the lives of everyone
as far as that's concerned. So we call that a love of benevolence
that bears goodwill to God, which we never had in reality until
the Lord Jesus Christ saved us. And then that other, the third
aspect of love to God is a love of gratitude. First, when you
are brought to know God, You come to delight yourself in him.
You know him. All of a sudden he introduces
himself to you, and you are brought to a knowledge of him. And what
a joy and delight it is to know the difference between the true
God and the idols that we served and believed on before. And then of course you begin
to bless God and to praise him for who he is and what he is,
and wish him well. But then you are filled with
gratitude for what he has done for you. So I think those three
aspects of law of conduct are embraced in this text here, when
David said, O love the Lord, all ye his Saints. He wants all the Saints of God
to love him. And of course they do love him,
if they are true Saints of the living God. And then he continues
in this text. to speak about the government
of God. If you'll notice that, he said,
"...for the Lord preserveth the faithful." We can love him, dear
friends, as his Saint, because he favors his Saints, the believers
on him. He is faithful to them. He preserves
them. And I think that's the testimony
of every child of God, that God has been faithful We confess
our unfaithfulness so many times as we really ought, and our slackness
and indifference toward God. But we can never charge God with
being unfaithful toward any of his dear Saints, any of his dear
people. This is what David is saying.
The Lord preserves the faithful. That's the settled judgment of
every child of God, and this is involved in the government
of God. God's committed to take care of his people, to preserve
them and to keep them. And he does just that. Now, he
says this further, "...and plentifully rewarded the proud doer." So
he not only preserves his dear people, but he takes that proud
doer. They will not kneel to him. They
will not suffer him. to be his God and his ruler,
and he plentifully rewardeth him." Now, there is a question
that arises in our minds, I'm sure. If God plentifully rewards
the proud doer and preserves his dear people, what is the
proportion between these two things, that is, sin and crime,
or crime and punishment? There is so much crime And people
are crying, well, where is the punishment? Why doesn't God punish
the wicked? Well, nevertheless, though that
seems to be out of all proportion, yet David knew the truth and
we ought to also. He said with confidence, "...and
plentifully rewardeth the proud doer." In the end, God is going
to give the proud doer, dear friends, his thorough punishment. We shall see that. And so, because
God is faithful to his children, whatever condition you may find
them in, or circumstance, or whatever he allows or points
to their pathway, in a way of affliction, sickness and trouble
and so forth, yet he will reward the child of God and he will
take that sinner unbowed and unyielded to him. and he will
thoroughly punish him." The awful judgment of God will one day
fall upon him, if not at the present time. So David continues
and says, because God's government is good and is righteous, and
God's going to take care of the whole situation, he's all wise
and he's all good, and he's able to do what he commits himself
to do and wants to do, he said, then, be of good courage. Be
of good courage, all you children of God. and he shall strengthen
your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord." What I'm doing
here this morning is leading up to the messages that I've
been bringing on Romans 8.28, perhaps as you have already felt,
when David said, O love the Lord, all ye his saints. You remember
Paul said in Romans 8.28, and we know that all things work
together. for good to them that love God,
to them who are the called according to his purpose, to them that
love God. And no one else does all things
or do all things work together for good. And so the Saints,
David said, O love the Lord, all ye his Saints, all the Saints
of God do love him. They love him because God planted
his love in their and brought them to love him." You know,
I brought you a message on this, the Saints love God, all things
work together for their good and to no one else's, and then
I brought you a message on the fruit of love to God. So this morning I want to continue
my thought along this line in connection with Romans 8.28 and
this passage of scripture here. where believers in Christ, and
that's what a saint of God is, he's not a perfect person, he's
not a sinless person, yet he's going to be in that day when
the Lord gets through with him. But he is sinning less as time
goes on and as he grows in grace and the knowledge of Christ.
But here, believers are encouraged and commanded and exhorted to
love the Lord. You know, there are many professed
lovers of God. Everywhere we hear people say,
I love the Lord. We ask them, do you love God?
And they reply, yes, I love God. And some of them say, I always
loved him. Whereas the Lord tells us that every natural man hates
him. You know that? Every one of us
before we were saved in our hearts hated God and did not love him. There wasn't a spark. of this
love in our hearts to the living God. But we didn't know him.
And the truth of the matter is, you can't love anybody whom you
do not know. But actually when we heard of
him, we really hated him. Isn't that your case? Somebody
was bragging about his love one day to me, telling me how much
he loved God, and always loved God. And I happen to know this
person. And I said, You know, you love
God. You profess to love him like
that, that means you adore him, you love what he said, you love
his commandments, you want to obey him, you're eager to get
to the worship of the Lord, and you're just running to the Lord
if you really love him. And of course it was a real test
to that heart, because those things were not true. And I knew
that, not that I set in absolute judgment upon this person, but
there was the of all these things. Beloved, if we say we love God
and do not keep his commandments, God says we are a liar. He doesn't
say we just made a mistake or you just made an error. He said
if you say you love God and you don't do what he tells you to
do, he says you tell a lie. So the natural man really hates
you, though he will not admit it, most of them. The natural
man will not If he can help it, allow God to rule over him. He
is always saying, you will not be my God, you will not be my
ruler, and I will not fear thee, and I will not love thee, I will
not bow to thee. So the natural man only comes
to love God by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. But all the
Saints of God do love him. And they are encouraged here
to love him more. Now why? Well, David gives some
reasons there, but I'd like to enlarge upon this a little more.
He is faithful to his Saints, he rewards them, he keeps them,
but he is going to reward also and bring recompense and punishment
upon the proud the wicked, the evildoer. Why should the Saints
of God love him, dear friends? Well, let me give you a number
of reasons. This is quite a big subject,
but for your delight in the Lord and your edification, I'd like
to call attention, first of all, that we love him because he first
loved us. Isn't this what the Bible says?
John says in 1 John We love him because he first loved us. God
loved us before we ever came to love him. As we were just
singing, Awake, my soul, and joyful lays, and sing his praise. God loved us when we hated him. This is a marvel of grace. And
we realize this when we come to know him and to love him in
grace and truth. One thing we stand and marvel
at, that God ever loved us, that God ever loved sinners, the wretched,
miserable, wrath-deserving sinners that we are and were. God loved
us before he ever brought us to love him, and brought us to
himself and made us to love him. And then in the second place,
we love him because There is no real true religion without
love to God. Now watch this, brethren, because
if you do not really love God, your religion is false. You say
you have proof of that, preacher? Well, let's look at what we call
the chapter on love in the Bible. If you want to know what love
is, I mean this divine love, You turn to 1 Corinthians 13,
and Paul said, "...though I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not love," that word is charity, but it is the
old English word for love, and so we read it love. He said,
"...have not love, I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling
cymbal," that's all you are, if you do not love. If you do
not have that, and though I have the gift of prophecy and understand
all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so
that I can remove mountains and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods
to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burnt and
have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Therefore, we say then,
that if we do not have this love to God, this true love to the
living God, dear friends, our religion is false, it's vain,
it's empty. It's nothing more than just dropping
a tin can on the floor, or a sounding cymbal, just beating the cymbals
together, with no meaning. So we must settle this question.
It's not how much we do, it's really how much we love. We hear
a lot of people talking about doing and doing and doing, and
works, of course, is good in their places. But works, dear
friends, without being based and motivated by the love of
God, are absolutely worthless. It's how much we love him. He doesn't accept any service
without love. You remember he said to Peter,
and we call attention to this very often, after Peter denied
him three times, the Lord asked him three times, he said, Do
you love me more than these? Well, Peter finally consented
and affirmed that he did love the Lord Jesus Christ, in spite
of the fact that he denied him through fear. So the Lord said
to him, Well, feed my sheep, feed my lamb, as if to say, If
you don't love If you really don't have any love for me, I've
got no place in my service for you. I don't think our Lord Jesus
Christ is interested in us, dear friends, in serving him because
we may think we have talents or we think we have ability or
we are smart or brilliant or whatever. The Lord Jesus Christ
uses men that have practically none of those things, but he
uses those who love him. If you love me, feed my sheep. feed my lamb." Isn't that wonderful? If you love the Lord Jesus Christ,
you are bound to love his sheep and bound to love his lambs. So David counseled his son Solomon
to serve the Lord with a willing heart, a willing mind. This is
what a child of God is to do. We love him, dear friends, because
he first loved us. We love him because there is
no true religion Religion is absolutely worthless and false
unless it's grounded and rooted in the love of God. And then,
in the third place, we love him because the reason we love him
is because, dear friends, love to God resembles God. Let me give you this. This is a wonderful verse of
scripture. And John said in his first letter,
this is not the gospel of John, but the letter of John there
near the close of the canon of scripture, in the 4th chapter
and verse 16, he said, And we have known and believed the love
that God hath to us. God is love, and he that dwelleth
in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," and verse 17 says,
"...herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in
the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world."
Now, what is that verse telling us? That verse of scripture is
telling us, by John here, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that the
person who really loved God God, the image of God is in him, because
he said, God is love. A loveless person does not know
God. That doesn't make any difference.
Whatever else is characteristic of him, if he doesn't have love
to God, he doesn't really know God, and he has not the image
of God in him, because he says, God is love, and he that dwelleth
in love dwelleth in God. And more than that, he says,
God dwells in him. And in this, our love is made
perfect. So then, when a sinner is saved,
he is brought to love God, and in that he is made to resemble
his Father in loving God. God loves him, and he dwells
in that love. And Paul tells us that faith
works by love. Faith does work, but it works
based upon love and motivated by love. The third reason why we love
God is because it is really the image of God in us. It is that
which resembles God. How much are we like God? Just
as much as we love God. and love his dear people. And
then I call attention to this. When David said, O love the Lord
all ye his saints, why in the fourth place should we love him?
Because love to God is a most reasonable thing, isn't it? A
most reasonable thing. You know, it's a strange thing,
actually, in this world, that men do not love each other. They
hate each other, though they are members of the same race,
have the same blood flowing through their veins. They hate each other,
trample each other on the foot, are envious and jealous, and
they'll kill each other. I just heard John Sessoms a little
while ago eat breakfast with some of these preachers, and
John honored the Lord. I was glad to hear that. I knew
him several years ago when He was committed to go to the mission
field to Brazil, and as I heard him give his testimony there
at the breakfast this morning, it was a delight to my soul,
because he honored the Lord. He said, I discovered that God
did it all. I didn't do anything for God
in saving myself. He said, God did it all and he
gets all the glory. I praise the Lord for that. But
John was telling about some of his experiences, and he mentioned
the horror of war. that he had been in, and men
killing each other, and he was in that business too. Horrible
things, to kill each other, to shed each other's blood, to hate
each other. In fact, the Lord Jesus Christ said, if you hate
your brother, or if you are angry with your brother, you are guilty
of murder in the sight of God. But love makes you like God.
Oh, dear friends, let's hear the exhortation of David then,
and the command, and be encouraged. Oh, love the Lord, all ye his
saints, he said. And then in the fifth place,
what object can we lavish our love on, what greater object
can we lavish our love on than God? about that. If you love God,
you love the Supreme, the superlative object. And you cast your love
upon one that will not disappoint you. You are loving one whom
there is no burden to love. Sometimes we say, we ought to
love each other. And then somebody said, well,
good night, how can I love so-and-so? How can I love that person? full of imperfections and failings
and backslidings and so forth, or there are certain features
about him I just don't like, and how can I love that person?"
Well, that's true. There are a lot of things about
us that are unloved, and we just might well admit it even after
we're saved. And while we do love each other
as the children of God, sometimes it becomes a burden to love each
other, doesn't it, when we get to know each other too well?
And we see the other person's faults so well. But despite that,
we do love the Saints of God. We don't love them because they
aren't perfect, because they are sinless. We love them because
they are God's children. They are sinners saved by the
grace of God, and they are making progress toward heaven. But there
is no burden in the love of God. Oh, when you examine God Almighty,
when you examine our Lord Jesus Christ, you can't find anything
wrong with him. You can't find anything, dear
friends, that's imperfect about him. And so you can just lavish
your love completely upon him and know that you'll never be
disappointed in him, whatever. And the more you come to love
him, the more you delight in him, and the more you rejoice
in him, so then it's a reasonable thing to love him. And most unreasonable
not to love him as a child of God, but we can't love a greater
object than the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Master. Then another thing, when David
said, O love the Lord all ye his saints, let me tell you this,
that when you love God, it makes your duties and your privileges
a lot easier to perform to God, does it not? I remember some time ago, somebody
asked a young married person, a lady, a wife, said, What kind
of work do you do? Oh, she said, I don't work. She
said, I keep house. And he replied, well, you mean
you keep the house and keep it clean and cook the meals and
look after your husband and your children and so forth and perform
those duties and you don't have any work to do? Well, she said,
it really isn't work. Well, why could she say that?
If she didn't love her husband, I'll tell you one thing, that
would have been a great burden. This business of housework is
not easy as all of us know that have had any part in it. But
oh, when you love a person, it isn't burdensome, it isn't a
labor, I mean a toil, though it's a task and it's done out
of love, it becomes a joy. And you say, it's not really
any work. Oh, beloved, before we came to love God, what an
awful duty it was to worship God, to attend the assemblies,
or to keep the commandments of God, to live according to his
word. It was just impossible, wasn't
it? And why so? Because there was no love to
God. But oh, when God did this for you and he brought you into
his family, then it becomes an easy thing. It's like the machine
sometimes gets all slowed down and doesn't work very well. And
the engineer said, Well, I know what it needs. It needs some
greasing. It needs some oiling. And so you put some grease on
the wheels and the gears, and it goes all right. And isn't
that the way in the Christian life? You let your love to God
wane, just let it grow lax, and these duties will become a burden.
Oh, it will, they'll become hard things, they'll become chores.
But oh, beloved, if you love God, they become easy. It's like
oiling the gears and the wheels, and the machine runs well. You
remember when Jacob would ask for Rachel, that the father,
Rachel, required him to work seven years for her, and the
scripture says, that he loved that girl so much that those
seven years just rolled by as no time at all. And so if we
love God, beloved, these duties will be performed with greater
ease. Let that be a lesson to us then.
And love the Lord, all ye his saints. We'll never grow weary
of serving him, though we might get tired in his service, and
we'll want to tell others about him. And then we ought to love
him, because God requires our love. He requires it. That's the first commandment,
isn't it? The first table says, Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength. So God requires our love. Well,
what's so amazing about that? Dear friends, one thing that
amazes me above everything else is that God loves me, that he
really does. Not like somebody, the modern-day
preacher says, God loves you and God wants to save you, God
loves everybody. And you say, well, how do I know
that God loves me? Well, he says God loves everybody,
so he must love you. And you believe that. Well, it
isn't so. But when you come to know that God really did love
you, and he gave his Son for you, and he brings you to himself,
that is the most amazing thing in the universe, that God would
love a sinner like me, hell deserving, one who hated him, one who didn't
love him. But then there's a second thing
that amazes me, and that is that God wants me to love him. He
wants me to love him! He commands it and requires it.
Why would God want me to love him? What could I add to the
glory of God or to God's being? Does he need my love? Why, he
could do without that very well. He can't add anything to a perfect
God, a glorious and absolutely perfect, infinite being, and
yet he says, I want you to love me. And if you love me, feed
my sheep. If you love me, serve me. And
thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart." God
isn't any better for my love. God can't be made any better
because he is all-glorious and all-perfect. And so I just stand and marvel. And
God would want a creature worthless as I am to love him. And yet he seeks that love. And
he seeks yours. And he tells David to say, this
scripture, Love the Lord, O love the Lord, all ye saints. Love him. And then what else? We ought to love him because
we owe it to him. Do we not? We owe God this love,
for God has commanded it. And we ought to love one who
loves us, should we not? One of the terrible things in
life is to love somebody who doesn't return that love. You
ever had that to happen to you? You love a person, and that person
just somehow or another can't or won't love you. Isn't that
quite a pain? You may show that love, you may
extend it, you may manifest it, you may do everything kindly
that you can to that person, to show that person you love
him, and then that person rejects that love and maybe hates you.
Maybe you're good to him when he's in trouble, you help him
out of difficulties, or when he's sick, or something else,
and yet he hates you. Beloved, if somebody loves us,
we really are duty-bound to love them in return. Certainly we
are. And we're ungrateful wretches
if we don't. What has God done for us? He
has done more for us than anybody could ever do for us. He saved
us from our sins and from the pit of hell, delivered us from
the wrath to come, given his Son for us. He has drawn us by
his Spirit and by the cords of love, and he has told us over
and over in the Word of God that he loves us! And now we are duty-bound
to love him! That first commander, the first
table of the deck along, dear friend, applies more to Christians
than to anybody else. All creatures ought to love him
because God is good to everybody. That they very exist is out of
his goodness. That they are fed, that they
are kept and preserved here on this earth, though they are never
saved, yet it is all out of the goodness of God and their duty
bound to love God. Those who have been snatched
from the pit of misery and sin and wretchedness and brought
to salvation in Christ are more obligated to love God than anybody
else. They have been made new creations
in Christ. So I think of a passage of scripture. I preached on this one time. me to preach on it again, and
maybe sometime I will get around to it. But it's a wonderful passage. In Ezekiel 16, in verse 6, God
gives us a picture of a center, and how that center is saved
in the 16th of Ezekiel. Well, we'll read before that.
Let's start with verse 1. Again, the word of the Lord came
unto me, saying, Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations. And you can't cause anybody but
Jerusalem to know her abomination. All others will not know their
sins or admit them in reality. And say, Thus saith the Lord
God unto Jerusalem, Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land
of Canaan. Thy father was an Amorite, and
thy mother an Hittite." That is, you were a bastard and illegitimate,
spiritually speaking. And as for thy nativity, in the
day that thou was born, thy navel was not cut. Neither was thou
washed in water to super thee, thou wast not salted at all,
nor swaddled at all. None I pitted thee to do any
of these things unto thee, to have compassion upon thee. But
thou wast cast out in the open field to the loathing of thy
person in the day that thou wast born." That's a picture of every
unsaved person, every one of us, before we are brought to
salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. But the amazing thing is, Verse
6, when the Lord saw us in that condition, that wretched condition,
filth and vile and polluted, he said, And when I passed by
thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto
thee, When thou wast in thy blood, live, live. Yea, I said unto
thee, When thou wast in thy blood, live." God then is glorified in the
salvation of sinners like that. And that's not just talking about
sinners that have run the gamut of sin in drunkenness and robbery
and adultery and everything else. He's talking about every last
child of God, dear friends, that he ever brought to life. Every
one of us were in our blood, uncut and unwashed, unsalted,
unpitted. With no compassion, nobody could
do anything for us but God. And when he passed by and saw
that awful, polluted state of things in us that would make
any creature to revolt, that would look upon it, God said,
I said unto thee, I say it in my love, live. Wonderful. That's a wonderful passage, we
won't take time to read that. We had in us everything to provoke
God to wrath, dear friends. Everything to make God want to
send us to hell, a holy and gracious and just God. But instead of
that, our very pollution and sin and misery and wretchedness
drew his love to us. And he said to us, When he said
that, of course, life came and a different life was established. And you know what the truth of
the matter is, that all the angels of heaven, all the cherubim and
seraphim and all the creatures and principalities and powers
out there in heavenly places, wonder at that love of God toward
us. They can't understand it. They
seek and search into it that they might know why God loved
us and why God really said, live and save us. And I don't understand
it either. I believe it and I rejoice in
it. And so you love him because you owe him love. That poor wretched
creature, God doing that for him, not love God? And then continuing, the reason
why we ought to love God is because the best way to love God is really
to love yourself, or the best way to love yourself, I should
say, is to love God. Now, scripture does not forbid
us to love ourselves entirely. The scripture puts it this way,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy
neighbor as thyself. God doesn't command you to love
your neighbor better than yourself, but he commands you to love your
neighbor as yourself. So you're bound to have some
love for yourself. If you didn't have some love
for yourself, you wouldn't even want to be saved, would you?
Because you love yourself, you love your soul, you don't want
to go to hell. You'd like to be saved if the
grace of God is in your heart. Self-love, God even uses that,
by the grace of God, to promote salvation. And genuine love to
God forwards our salvation. We really cannot love ourselves
as we ought until we come to love God. Can a poor sinner really
love himself going headlong and dashing to hell as fast as he
can go? Can a sinner love his soul, hating
the only Savior that can save his soul, and that would save
that soul should he repent and believe on him and turn unto
him from his idols and sins? So then, you really want to love
yourself in the right way, in the best way? Love God. Love God, and you'll really come
to love yourself properly. and not abuse that love. We read
back there in 1 John 4, verse 16, "...he that dwelleth in love
dwelleth in God, and God in him." Those who love God have God dwelling
in their hearts, and they are going to dwell with him in heaven.
And they really dwell with him now, or in him at the present
time. Let's continue one or two other
things. Love to God is the mark of sincerity. Why should we love God, all you
Saints? Because that is the mark of your
sincerity. Canticles, or the Song of Solomon,
chapter 1, verse 4, says, "...the upright love thee." The upright. Well, who are the upright? There
are many Christians who question their sincerity. And they do
this. We all should. We ought to search
our motives. Do I really love God? Am I really
sincere in my love and profession and serving God? Do you ever
question that? You ought to, because our wicked
hearts will many times tell us that we are so sincere and we
are all this, that, and the other, if we would look at them. In
reality, we might know something different. But how may we know
we are sincere? The Word of God says, the upright
love him. If we love God, it means we are
upright. If we love God, it means we are
really sincere. Getting back to Peter again,
the Lord Jesus said, Lovest thou me? Lovest thou me? You denied me? Oh, you did. You said you wouldn't. Oh, you
said if all the rest denied me, you wouldn't do that. But you
did it! Now, Peter, do you really love
me? Are you upright? Are you sincere?" Well, Peter,
the Lord searching his heart, Peter found that he did love
him. He didn't boast about it, but he said, You know that I
do love you. All right, then, you upright, feed my sheep and
feed my lambs. And then I think I'll close with
this point. Why should a child of God love God? Why should a
saint love him? Well, beloved, because it's dangerous
not to love God. Do you know how dangerous it
is? It's so dangerous that if you
don't love God, you will love sin, one or the other. You'll either love God or you'll
love sin. And isn't it better to love God
than to love sin? What can sin do for you? It can
do anything but damn you and send your soul to hell. But if
you love God, God says, I love them that love me! And he said,
I'll dwell with them! And God will give you peace of
mind. Sin won't do that. A person cannot
be in sin serving sin and have a peace of mind. People who love
sin are not content, they have not that peace of mind. But if
you love God, God can give you and will give you peace of mind. Sin will keep you out of heaven.
But if you love God, dear friend, there is no fear of losing heaven.
Every person who ever loved God in truth and sincerity will be
in heaven, surely. And by loving God, we enjoy him
in his goodness and service. Sin can't return your love. There
is no love in sin. God does return that love. And
he said, if you love me, I'll love you. John 14, verse 23,
this is the gospel of John. Jesus answered, verse 23, and
said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep
my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto
him and make our abode with him." You see that? There is the promise
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that if you love God, God will return
that love. And God, he says, my Father and
I will come to him. You will know God in reality,
within you. And then, when you love sin,
you love the worst thing in the whole universe. Isn't anything
any worse than sin, is it? Now, people say, well, they're
afraid of war, they're afraid of sickness, they're afraid of
cancer and tuberculosis, they're afraid of the swine flu, and
all these things. But you don't have too many people
who fear sin, do you? They love sin. And of course,
that's our nature. Without the grace of God to love
sin! But when you love sin, you love
the worst thing in the whole universe of God, you love that
which God hates. But when you love God, you love
the best thing, the most glorious person in the whole wide world.
That's enough for this time, then, about that. Do you love
him, then, dear friends? O love the Lord, all ye his Saints. And then he said in Romans 8,
28, that if you do love God, to them that love God, all things
work together for good, everything, in the vast world and universe. I know we're not to boast about
our love, but boast about his love. If you know he loves you,
you can't help but love him. And we can just reverse that. If you love God, you can know
he loves you. Do you love God? He said, well,
I love you then. I don't know whether God loves
me or not. The question is, do I love him? I love him. To him, to those who love God,
all things work together. So here's the encouragement then.
Here is the exhortation and the command. All ye Saints, love
the Lord. Love him. And may the Lord bless
that exhortation to every heart. Dear friends, if you don't love
him, all may give you grace to do so. Today can be his goodwill
to bring you to him, to grant you this love in your heart,
to love God. And then you'll know by his word
that everything will be for your good. Nothing can hurt you, nothing
can harm you. And may the Lord bless you. And
now then let us turn to hymn number 205.