This is an excerpt from our free booklet, Love: The Fourth Sunday of Advent.
Again, He enjoins this love upon us, saying, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.” See how the Heart of God craves our love! Surely it had been much had He suffered us to love Him, even as Laban suffered Jacob to love and labour for Rachel! But He goes much further, and bids us love Him with all our might, lest perchance the sight of His Majesty and our frailty should raise up a barrier, and keep us from Him; whereby He testifies that He has not given us for nought a natural inclination to love Him, urging us, as He thus does by universal precept, to foster that inclination, to which end He gives power to every living soul.
As the natural sunshine vivifies all things with its warmth, and with its universal love stimulates them to bring forth after their kind, so the sunshine of God’s Love kindles every soul, and draws it to Himself…And to live to God is to love; for he that loveth not abideth in death. How greatly then does God desire that we love Him!
Nor does He stop short in thus generally calling us to love Him; yet more, He stands at the door of each human heart and knocks, promising that “if any man hear My Voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him,” that is, will admit him to the closest familiarity. What does all this prove but that God gives us not merely means sufficient to love Him and be saved, but that it is a rich, overflowing sufficiency, such as one might look for from such boundless Goodness as His.
Image: Francis de Sales by Nicolas Pitau (1662) (Source).
