Love

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him (I John 4:16).

Love is the most essential and the most characteristic of Christian virtues. He who lacks this scarcely deserves the name of Christian at all, while he who possesses this is on the way to possess all. We are all familiar with the strong language that the Apostle St. Paul uses upon this subject:

Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not [love], I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not [love], it profiteth me nothing (I Corinthians 13:2-3

These startling words are confirmed by our Lord Himself in His epistle to the Church of Ephesus, where, you will remember, after acknowledging the work, and labor, and patience, and jealousy for the truth and for righteousness which characterized that Church, He goes on to speak of her as a fallen church, because she had left her first love; and warns her that, unless she repent, He will come and remove her candlestick from its place altogether.

When we ask why such stress is laid upon the importance of possessing this virtue above all others, more than one answer suggests itself to our minds. First, we may observe that some explanation is given in the words of this text. Love is the most divine of Christian graces, because “God is love.” Love is of the very essence of His being; other characteristics He has; Love He is. Now clearly the great object of our training and development here is to make us Godlike; but if love is the essential character of God, evidently we can only be conformed to the divine image in so far as love is supreme within us. It is when we “dwell in love,” according to the phrase that the Apostle here uses, that we “dwell in God, and God in us.” A loveless soul can never be a Godlike soul; for God is love. On the other hand, when we dwell in love, when it is, as it were, the element in which we live and move