Lent Book: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/an-ocean-of-grace
My jottings:
(Comments welcome)
Ocean of Grace (8): WEDNESDAY – The
Lord Our Lover (p33ff)
What makes you want to sing? Pray for a
similar, a greater, delight and joy in Christ. We should be more overflowing
with excitement for Jesus even than for Wales beating England in the rugby!
Meditate on God’s rapturous and extravagant delight
in us. Although he is fully satisfied and blessed in himself and eternally impassable
and immutable and so on, our loving heavenly Father really does love us and is
pleased with our weak and stammering expressions of faith and love (which are
after all his own work in us).
Yesterday we mentioned some of the texts which
speak of God’s people as his wife / bride or of the Church as the bride of
Christ. We should perhaps have mentioned above all the Song of Solomon / The
Song of Songs (which by the way, means the best of songs) which speaks of God’s
love for his people.
For talks and resources on The Song of Songs
see: http://rosclarke.co.uk/the-greatest-song/
http://rosclarke.co.uk/publications/
Luther also describes the wonderful exchange
which takes place when we are joined by faith to Christ our husband. He takes
on our debts and disgrace and we get his honour and name and riches.
“...Christ and
the soul become one flesh [Eph.
5:31-32]. And if they
are one flesh, and if between them there is a true marriage... it follows that
everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil.
Accordingly, the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has
as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has, Christ claims as his own.
... Let us compare these, and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full
of grace, life and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death and damnation.
Now let faith come between them, and sins, death and damnation will be
Christ's, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul's... By the wedding
ring of faith he shares in the sins, death and pains of hell, which are his
bride's.... Her sins cannot now destroy her... and she has that righteousness
of Christ, her husband, ... and [can] say, "If I have sinned, yet my
Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine and mine is
his..."
https://www.reformation21.org/blogs/luthers-royal-marriage.php
(The Freedom of a Christian, 1520, if I recall
correctly. I went through a phase of sending this extract to Christian friends
on their wedding days!)
We might pray with the Apostle Paul that we
would have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and
high and deep is the love of Christ for us and that we might know this love
which surpasses knowledge. (Ephesians 3:14-21). What a love! We can know it
truly but never completely because it is in exhaustible. It can never be used
up or run out. However far along we get in the way of love, it still stretches
out to the far horizon. We can soak deep down into it, but we can never plumb
its depths.
Jesus’ love is of every love the best. It is
the love of loves, and worth singing about.
Hymn: Jesus Lover of My Soul
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ijNGxMWUI
Words etc.: https://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/h/1057
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