Jesus Loves Me, This I Know
Worshipping through music is one of the sweetest and most powerful ways to express our love to Christ. It is ascribing worth to the one who is worthy; offering a sacrifice of praise to the one who sacrificed all for us.
But before we can understand how we can love God, we must savor God’s love for us. As 1 John 4:19 reads, “We love, because he first loved us.”
True love, like the kind Jesus speaks about in the Great Commandment, stems out of the rich soil of God’s love, so that all of the fruit it produces will reflect his character and nature.
J.I. Packer beautifully describes God’s love, writing, “His love finds expression in everything that he says and does.”[i]
So, how does God manifest his love toward us? John 3:16 teaches that God demonstrates his love for the world by giving, “his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
Paul highlights this glorious truth writing, “God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He died on the cross so that we may be adopted into his family.
As Packer summarizes, “The New Testament gives us two yardsticks for measuring God’s love. The first is the cross; the second is the gift of sonship.”[ii]
John also reminds the church of this love in his letters: "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9).
D.A. Carson notes, “God’s love is both the model and the incentive of our love.”[iii]
We can begin to teach this in our homes even when our children are young. We can apply the deep love of Christ to their hearts from the earliest of ages. I see this possibility every time I sing Jesus Loves Me with my 3-year-old son Silas. When we get to the chorus he always sings loud. Lying there in his bed he cries out, “Yes, Jesus loves Silas, Yes, Jesus loves Silas, Yes, Jesus loves Silas, the Bible tells me so.”
All on his own, he has found a way to personalize the love of Christ. All on his own, he has found a way to rejoice over the love that Jesus has for him. All on his own, through a simple song, Silas is already coming to know, little by little, the love of Christ.
This matters, because apart from knowing the love of Christ, we cannot love at all. We can offer, at best, the fallen world’s version of love: twisted, incomplete, perverted, selfish, unsatisfying versions of God’s love.
Can a family devoid of the love of Christ love the Lord, or even each other, for that matter? Absolutely not. God is love. He’s not just our best example of love. He’s not just loving. He is Love. Apart from God, there is no love. Absent of Christ in our lives, there is no love. There is a world’s imitation of love, filled with emotion and sentiment and commitments driven by the flesh and relationships founded upon natural feelings, but there is no love—not in the true, genuine, full sense.
Our best effort at loving someone else is still but a mere glimpse into what Christ offers all who abide in him. As Spurgeon wrote, “Sweet above all other things is love—a mother’s love, a father’s love, a husband’s love, a wife’s love—but all these are only faint images of the love of God.”[iv]
[i]J.I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois: 1993), p. 122.
[ii]Ibid., p. 214.
[iii]D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois: 2000), p. 48.
[iv]C.H. Spurgeon, His Great Love: Volume 52, Sermon #2968 as quoted in Stephen McCaskell’s, Through the Eyes of C.H. Spurgeon: Quotes from a Reformed Baptist Preacher (Lucid Books, Brenham, TX: 2012), p. 68.
This Blog is an excerpt from Gospel Family, p. 63-64
