As Christians we can put up cheerfully with all manner of trials provided we feel a sense of Christ' s love. This is the key to Christians' courage all through history. They have sung God's praises while they suffered the lash as galley-slaves. They have been beside themselves with ecstasy in prisons, in chains, in torments and in fire because they have fel t the love of Christ poured upon their hearts. Like Stephen, they have scorned the pains of stoning because they have seen the Son of God before their minds. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church because Christ has been with them in the fires.

No experience is better for the soul than to feel the love of Christ. It was with this that Christ prepared his disciples as they faced life without his visible presence. He was concerned in the Upper Room (John 13: 17) to assure and re-assure them of his love, a love which would not diminish after he was removed from their sight but which would bring them, and all like them, to the glory of heaven at last.

The Upper-Room discourse was Christ' s tender farewell to those who would soon have to face the whole cruel world after his decease.

With a foresight of their coming trials and martyrdom, our Lord prepares the disciples for their undreamed-of labours and sufferings, successes and triumphs in his Name by expounding to them the evidences of his affection for them. ' Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me' (John 14:1). ' I go to prepare a place for you . . . I will come again and receive you unto myself' (14:2). ' I am in the Father, and the Father in me' (14:1, 10). ' Whatsoever ye shall ask . . . I will do' (14:13). ' He shall give you another Comforter' (14:16). ' Peace I leave with you' (14:27). ' These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full' (15:11). ' Love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends' (15:12-14). With these and many other similar words of sweetness our Lord strengthened the hearts of those whom he loved in this world. And he still strengthens those who are his to this day.

We must not fail to notice that this entire section of our Lord' s ministry (John 13:17) begins and ends with reference to his love for those who are his true disciples. The passage begins and ends with Christ' s love, ' Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end' (13:1). So the Upper-Room discourse begins. So too it closes as our Lord concludes his great prayer: ' That the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them' (17:26). It is clear that this latter reference to Christ' s love refers to what all his people are to experience eternally at last. The church' s destiny is defined by the terms here of this High-Priestly prayer. It is to be a destiny in which we shall know, with all the saints, eternal unity of soul, suffused with glory and love (17:21, 22, 24, 26). In heaven the cream and top of all our delights will be to enjoy the sense of God' s love for us in Christ forever.

Some of the joys of heaven are postponed till we arrive there. The beatific vision of the ever-blessed Triune God cannot be seen by any in this life and will not be seen till we get to glory. And so it is with many other blessings of heaven. But not so wi th the love of Christ. This can be known by believers here and now, and it is known by them.

The Christian who claims to feel Christ' s love for him is no fanatic but a genuine New Testament believer. It is true, Christ' s love in the soul is a mystery which we cannot fully explain. But it is a reality which we would be wrong to suppress or deny. The Acts of the Apostles is an in comprehensible book unless we see that the early Christians were daily feasting on Christ, daily aware in experience of his love, and daily seeking to please him in thi s life. How else can we explain their holy boldness, their contempt for outward sufferings, their disdain for spurious ecclesiastical authority? For them all, as for Paul, the saying was true: ' For me to live is Christ' (Phil 1:21).

The Apostle Paul could hardly forgive himself for his cruel persecution of the Lord' s people in his unregenerate days. But, for all his awareness of past sin and ignorance, he does not hide the experience which followed him everywhere, of feeding on Christ' s felt love for him. ' The love of Christ constraineth us' (2 Cor. 5:14). ' The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts' (Rom. 5:5). ' God commendeth his love toward us' (Rom. 5:8). ' Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?' ( Rom . 8:35). ' His great love wherewith he loved us' ( Eph . 2:4). ' Rooted and grounded in love' ( Eph . 3:17). ' To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge' ( Eph . 3:19). Our sins, however dark they have been, must not become to us a cloud that obscures the light of Christ' s loving face for us as his people.

The love of Jesus Christ is not in word or promise only. It does not consist of fair speeches only, or sweet utterances of the mouth. Christ has demonstrated his love for us as his people by his mighty redemptive actions. ' He loved me and gave himself for me' ( Gal . 2:20). That is why the Christian can never stop talking about the Cross and the blood of his Saviour. To the hypocrite these are offensive things. The false Christian would much prefer to think of Christ' s love apart from the Cross, and t he blood that was shed there on it. But the true child of God glories in the Cross as the supreme evidence of his Saviour' s love. The blood and sweat of Gethsemane, the agony and darkness of Calvary are to the real Christian the tangible expressions of his glorious Redeemer' s love for him.

He who would make any progress in his knowledge of Christ' s love must meditate often on the blood-shedding and sorrow of Jesus. ' The Son of God loved me' , let every Christian say, ' before I had any existence or any being. While he was making the universe his love was set on me. I was in his thoughts in eternity past. Even when as yet there was no world, no paradise, no sin, I was in his mind. He looked along the corridors of time and his intention was, even at that time, to come for me and to rescue me. All through history he saw me and his zeal stirred him to come into this dark world to take me home to glory.'

As a woman with no children goes to an orphanage and takes from it a child for herself, so Christ came into this orphanage of a world to remove us from it and take us home. As a wealthy man might see his heart' s desire in a poor beggar-woman and make of her his bride, so Christ looked on his poor people and in his love and pity he lifted them from the dunghill to become his spouse and bride, ' members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones' ( Eph . 5:30; see also Genesis 2:23).

It is not difficult for the true believer to hate his sins or to confess them to God. He hates them because they are what occasioned the damnation of the One whom now he loves. It is not hidden from a true believer' s eye that if Christ is our righteousness, then we were his condemnation, and our sins the occasion of his death.

It is a strange relationship that the believer has with his own sin. He does it against his deepest desire and he is hearty in deploring the evil of his shortcomings. If he could only lay aside his sin he would do so at once and for ever. He hates what he does amiss because sin is the very contradiction of God. The Christian who sins easily is either an ignorant Christian or no Christian at all.

Backsliding in the soul always begins with a decline in our love for the Saviour himself. We grow cold towards the One who died for us. It is possible for the Christian to be active long after he has declined in his love to Jesus. A man may go on with his preaching, or writing, or serving, long after his heart has ceased to feel the warmth of its first love to the Lord whom he still attempts to serve.

But all our service is second-rate if it does not come from a heart of burning love to our Master. No words are more terrible than those heard by the church at Ephesus: ' Thou hast left thy first love' ( Rev. 2:4). They were very orthodox and very busy in Christian work; but they had lost the lustre of their first love. Christ has little love for cold-hearted service.

Perhaps our greatest need as Christians today is to rise above the habitual coolness with which we treat the love of Christ. If Jesus Christ is God and died for me, as a great missionary once said, then no sacrifice is too great for me to make for him. Let every believer say the same. Let every believer remind himself that we deserve, one and all, to be cast away forever into the outer darkness. It is mercy that we have been s pared this judgment which we richly deserved. Have I forgotten that I am what I am because Christ laid down his life?

Whatever of philanthropy or public-spiritedness we shall ever read of in this history of our poor human race, we shall not meet with any w ho did for us what Jesus Christ has done. Where do we find any, apart from our Lord Jesus Christ, who drank lovingly the cup of our damnation? Kings and great men have, for the most part, spent their energies on conquering empires and amassing wealth for themselves. But Jesus Christ, and he alone, chose the way of poverty and gave his soul to be an offering for our sins. It was Christ' s one great passion to glorify God by raising us all up to the glory of heaven.

The secret of Christianity is that it makes men ready and willing to ' count all things but dung' for Christ' s sake ( Phil . 3:8). It makes men willing to be despised and even counted ' as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things' ( 1 Cor . 4:13) for the love they bear to Christ.

But no man will venture all for Christ till he has tasted richly of his love within his soul. Such love is described as a being ' filled with all the fulness of God' ( Eph . 3:19). It is, in other words, the best experience possible in earth or heaven. It is a ' knowing of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge' (Eph . 3:19). To know this in the heart here and now is to have a heaven before heaven. No wonder Christ himself said, ' Greater love hath no man than this' ( John 15:13).

MAURICE ROBERTS