Friday April 19

Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. John 13:1

Christ’s Love for His Own in View of Calvary

How wonderful is the love of Jesus, our Savior and our Lord! In it there is no alloy, no mixture of selfishness, and no reserve. It passes knowledge, we are told in the Holy Word, and how true it is, for no human thought can measure the bounds of it or gauge its strength. Yet we may know it, and, thank God, we do know it; we know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. We know it because it has been told to us, as He alone could tell it, told not in words only, that might be treasured for a while and then forgotten, but in deeds; told in a way it has taken to win us, and to make us eternally happy; told in what it has suffered for us, and in what it shares with us.

We shall do well to heed the first command in John’s Gospel, “Behold the Lamb of God”; to follow with eyes anointed that pathway of holiness and love to the cross, and to follow it with adoration. The more deeply we know the love of Jesus, the more unknowable we find it to be; the more we consider the way of it, the more amazed we stand at its wisdom and its warmth. It is not a blind love that may awaken to find flaws that it knew not of in its objects, for it knew from the beginning with omniscient certainty all about the loved ones.

It knew, also, with unerring knowledge of God the whole way of sorrow that must of necessity be trodden in order to obtain its desire. It is a love that cannot be disappointed or alarmed, for when the great tests came it neither faltered nor fled. We need not fear that it will break down or change now; it has been fully proved.

J. T. Mawson