Describing the Love of Christ | The Whole Counsel

And this week we're looking at a sermon by John Witherspoon on the love of God. And we'll talk about this in a few minutes, but I really think that this topic is one that illustrates what we've been saying in the past weeks about the importance of order.

The Sermon’s Seven Characteristics of Christ’s Love

Let me give you a quick overview of the sermon before we talk about it. Basically, the sermon gives us seven characteristics of the love of Christ and a couple of applications. So the seven characteristics are.

The love of Christ is an everlasting love. The love of Christ is free and unmerited. The love of Christ is unsolicited. The love of Christ is a distinguishing love. The love of Christ is an expansive love.

The love of Christ is a most generous and disinterested love. And the love of Christ is a most fruitful, active, and beneficent love.

Why the Love of God Must Be Understood in Order

So before we even get to those main points, we both feel that this is a sermon, a topic, that illustrates the benefit of this book probably more than any of the others. Because it is a topic or a theme in Scripture that is so significant, the love of God, even for his enemies.

And yet it's a theme that is made weightless to many ears in Western evangelicalism because of the lack of understanding of other truths that you need to have clear if you're to understand love. So a small view of God, big view of me, the idea that someone says to me, well, you do know that God loves you, don't you?

The attitude in our heart, even though we probably wouldn't say it, is, well, of course he does. I'm a lovable person. So no shock. The whole idea that Newton spoke of when he wrote Amazing Grace, it's foreign to many.

And really it's foreign to us. It's foreign to my own heart when I don't keep before my mind's eye certain facts that are fundamental. Facts about God and about me, the very things that we've been talking about in the sermons leading up to this.

So I guess we could simply say it this way, what you think of the person who's talking and what you think of you, the person who's listening, that really does affect how you weigh their words. So if we have a wrong view of God, the idea that he loves us is just not astonishing.

God’s Love Becomes Astonishing After Sin and Judgment Are Preached

So if we go back and start with those early sermons in the book where God is described and sin is described, then for the next statement that comes across your ears to be that God loves you, it is one of the great wrecking balls of Scripture.

It's just like he says here, his opening line to the whole sermon, he says, redeeming love is certainly the most delightful of all themes to every real Christian. And that's true when we're thinking rightly.

Witherspoon on Deliverance, Forgiveness, and the Sense of Guilt

And while Witherspoon doesn't develop this idea of order to the degree that you just did, there are a couple of quotes I thought that really pinpoint the fact that he does agree with that. He sees it.

So for instance, he said, the believer can owe but little if the deliverance is not great. If you don't see what you've been delivered from, you don't love much if you haven't been forgiven much. And then another one, why is the love of Christ so cold a subject to the generality of the world?

Is it not because they have no sense of their guilt and misery? So just what you've said, the order is important.