The Obligation of Divine Love

We need a new sense of divine love.  There's nothing more powerful in the whole world than the power of love. Love will motivate and empower people to do what nothing else can cause or compel them to do.

In Song of Solomon 8:6 we are told, "…for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave." Death is the one power that is universally recognized as superseding all human power.  With all our

knowledge of medical science, and in all we know about human existence and the human body, we are still helpless before the power of death.

Why is it that many churches are doing so little in getting the gospel to unreached peoples around the world?  Is it because we have lost our sense of obligation from divine love?  If the church is to accomplish the evangelization of the world, this one essential motive must be present in the believer's heart, and in the church.

Christ's love in us gives us a burden for the souls of men, and compels us to go to them with the message of salvation.  Remember that the Apostle Paul was consumed for his own people because the love of Christ was in him.  In Romans 9:3 he said, "For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race..."  In the previous verse he stated, "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart."

Paul was constantly burdened for his own people, and in Romans 10:1 he says, “Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved."  This was not merely the love of a normal man, it was the divine love of God in the heart of a spiritual man.  Love is the first evidence of the fruit of the Spirit, and anyone filled with the Spirit is filled with the love of God.  The two experiences always go together.

David Brainerd, one of the earliest men to carry the gospel to the Native Americans of North America, was found one morning on his knees in sub-zero weather.  With perspiration dripping off his face, he was crying out to God for the souls of those people he had learned to love and sought to win for Christ. He was compelled by love in his own heart.

This is exactly what it takes to be a missionary.  Human love alone cannot do it, but God's own love is sufficient to motivate us to go anywhere to proclaim the gospel of Christ.  It was the love of Christ that moved Him to come into this world and go to the cross to provide salvation for sinful man.  And it must be His love in us that motivates us to take up that cross and bear it to the ends of the earth for His name.

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