describe the perfect character. “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself.” Get these ingredients into your life. Then everything that you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It is worth giving time to. No man can become a saint in his sleep; and to fulfill the condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and meditation and time, just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mental, requires preparation and care. Address your selves to that one thing; at any cost have this trans cendent character exchanged for yours. You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life that has gone, four or five short experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one’s life abide. Everything else in all our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of love which no man knows about or can ever know about — they never fail. In the book of Matthew, where the judgment day is depicted for us in the imagery of one seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, “How have I believed?” but “How have I loved?” The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not religiousness, but love. I say the final test of religion at that great day is not religious ness, but love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of com mission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the Spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that — I lived for myself, I thought for myself, Thank God the Christianity of today is coming nearer the world’s need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know better by a hair’s breadth what religion is, what God is, who Christ is, where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ? Where? “Whoso shall receive a little child in my name receiveth me.” And who are Christ’s? “ Every one that loveth is bom of God.” END. For myself, and none beside — Just as if Jesus had never lived, As if He had never died.
I was to have a thing called peace or I was to have rest or I was to have joy or I was to have safety. But I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him — that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to love — hath everlasting life. The gospel offers a man a life. Never offer men a thimbleful of gospel. Do not offer them merely joy or merely peace or merely rest or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul and spirit and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward. Many of the current gospels are addressed only to a part of man’s nature. They offer peace, not life; faith, not love; justification, not regeneration. And men slip back again from such religion because it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it. It offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was lived before. Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of the world. To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love. We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do we want to live tomorrow? Is it because there is someone who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow and be with and love back? There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go, he has no contact with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand. Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ’s own definition. Ponder it. “ This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” Love must be eternal. It is what God is. On the last analysis then love is life. Love never faileth and life never faileth so long as there is love. That is the philosophy of what Paul is showing us, the reason why in the nature of things love should be the supreme thing — because it is going to last, because in the nature of things it is an eternal life. It is a thing that we are liv ing now, not that we get when we die; that we shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living now. No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved. To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God. For God is love. Now I have all but finished. How many of you will join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next three months? A man did that once and it changed his whole life. Will you do it? It is for the greatest thing in the world. You might begin by reading it every day, especially the verses which
THE KING'S BUSINESS
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