Note P

NOTE P.

The Spirit Of Christ And His Love (Chap. 29).

'Know then that I am love incarnate; I have clothed myself with flesh that I might reign in your hearts. Love one another as I have loved you, and you will no longer find me absent . All my life and sufferings have this for their end—that Divine love should tabernacle permanently among men. I have been manifest in the flesh, I must be manifest in the Church. Love one another as I have loved you, that earth, startled to see me ascending on high, may turn to you, and behold with glad su i prise Christ in you. Love is about to have the highest revelation it has ever had; but when you gaze upon the cross, especially when the Holy Spirit enables you to look with intelligent eye upon it, understand that the love there revealed is your model. That which dies upon the cross is to live in you. "By this shall all men know :" this is that evidence that none shall be able to resist.

'Having been introduced in the person of Jesus into our common humanity, Love refuses to disengage itself, and makes provision for its own perpetuation. Whatever discoveries the disciples were yet to make of the love of Christ, from His death on the cross, and by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, were discoveries of the love they were required to entertain for one another. They were each commissioned to carry on the loving lift •of Jesus.

'But how may this thing be? It is by virtue of the union of the believer to Christ that the heart of the former becomes the depositary of the Saviour's own love for His people. The vocation of every believer is this: to be a revelator of the love of Christ.

'" If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye fchall auk what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." Js it ilitficult to see why the prayers of Christ's people are u'rt more promptly fulfilled? They do not suffer His word to abide in them, they do not practically recognise their obligation to love one another as He has loved them. Who' knows how many priceless expressions of the Father's love toward us are effectually repressed by the fact that we are inattentive to the sweet mandate of Jesus, to give each other His love? We profess to desire earnestly the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, but we shall do well to note that one of the first things which the Holy Spirit will aim to produce in us will be this Christ-like love to the brethren.

'My Christian brethren see not the Saviour with their bodily eye, but I have been commissioned by the Saviour to afford them, in some sense, a compensation for this deficiency. I am commanded to let the love which found exhibition in His mortal person find now its exhibition in my life a command which would be utterly idle and futile, were it not that He, the everloving One, is willing to put His own love within me. The command is really no more than to be a branch of the True Vine. I am to cease from my own living and loving, and yield myself to be the expression of Christ's love.'—George Bowen: Love Bevealed.