Love That Passeth Knowledge

And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. EPHESIANS 3:19

The Way to God, the little book in which Moody gathered the heart of his preaching, does not begin with sin, or the law, or the judgement. It begins with the love of God. That order was deliberate. Moody had learned, from his own heart and from twenty years of talking with anxious people, that most men and women keep away from God not because they have examined the gospel and found it wanting, but because they are afraid of Him. “The trouble is that men think God hates them; and so they are all the time running away from Him.”

He knew the fear from the inside. He confessed in the same chapter that for years he had thought more of Christ than of the Father, picturing God as a stern judge whose anger the Son had to appease. It was becoming a father himself that changed him. As he looked at his own boy, he began to think it must have required more love for the Father to give His Son than for the Son to die.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. JOHN 3:16

That verse, he said, was so high that he could never climb to it; he would quote it and pass on. It was the verse Harry Moorhouse had preached on for night after night in Chicago, and it undid Moody’s old preaching. From then on the love of God was the first and last note of everything he said.

Love that does not change

The first thing Moody insists on is that God’s love is unchangeable. Human love cools. Friends drift apart, and love can even turn to hatred. God’s love does not. He points to the night of the betrayal: Jesus knew that Judas would sell Him and that Peter would deny Him, and still He washed their feet.

Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. JOHN 13:1

It was that love, Moody says, that broke Peter’s heart and brought him back. And then he draws the distinction that every anxious person needs to hear. God hates sin, and He hates it precisely because it ruins the people He loves. But the sinner and the sin are not the same. “God loves the sinner; but He hates the sin.” A mother does not stop loving her child because he is disobedient; she loves him still, and hates what is harming him.

Stronger than a mother’s love

Moody’s favourite picture of the love of God was a mother’s love, because he thought it the strongest human love there is. He had watched his own widowed mother hold her family together, and he filled his sermons with mothers: the mother who sat through her son’s trial for murder and asked to be buried beside him, the mother who hung her picture on the wall of a mission hall in Glasgow in the hope that her lost daughter would see it. But he always ended in the same place. No mother’s love compares with God’s.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. ISAIAH 49:15

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. ISAIAH 49:16

It is worth dwelling on what that means. The love that holds a mother to a child who has disgraced her is only a reflection of the love of the God who made mothers. If we can hardly imagine a mother giving up her child, we should be ashamed to imagine that God has given us up.

Loved before we loved

The second thing Moody insists on is that God loved us first. Many people, he says, assume that God will love them once they have become good, or once they have begun to love Him. The Bible teaches the opposite. God loved us while we were His enemies, and His love is the cause of our turning, not its reward.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. ROMANS 5:8

He found the same order in a single phrase from the Revelation: unto him that loved us, and washed us (Revelation 1:5). It might have been expected, he says, that God would first wash us and then love us. But no; He loved us first. He compared it to a mother who finds her lost child ragged and filthy at the back of a meeting. She does not wait until he is washed and dressed before she runs to him. She takes him in her arms first, and washes him afterwards.

Why should God love us at all? Moody admits that he cannot say, except that it is God’s nature. “It is His nature to love; just as it is the nature of the sun to shine.” That is the ground of all hope. If God’s love depended on our deserving it, no one would be safe. Because it flows from what He is, no one is beyond it.

Seen at the cross

Where is this love to be seen? Moody’s answer never varied: at Calvary. He asks his readers to stand at the foot of the cross and hear the prayer for the men who were driving in the nails, and then to say, if they can, that God does not love them.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. JOHN 15:13

Christ did more than that, Moody adds; He laid down His life for His enemies. The cross is the measure of the love of God, and it is a measure no one has ever reached the end of. That is why Paul could pray that the Ephesians might know a love that passes knowledge. Moody compares it to Columbus discovering America and dying without knowing much of what he had found. We may have discovered something of the love of God; there are heights and depths of it that eternity will not exhaust.

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:10

Love that can be refused

There is one more thing Moody says, and it is the reason his love is never sentimental. The love of God can be resisted. God does not love people into heaven against their will; He wants sons and daughters, not machines. “If any one is lost it will not be because God does not love him: it will be because he has resisted the love of God.”

That is where Moody always pressed his hearers. Having shown them the love of God, he asked what they would do with it. Would they trample it underfoot, or give themselves to Him that hour?

A word of balance is in order. Moody preached the love of God with such warmth that a hasty reader might think he made little of God’s holiness. He did not. The same book speaks plainly of judgement, and his next chapters are about sin and the blood. But he was sure that people will not come to a God they believe hates them. He would rather have them run toward the Father’s love, and learn His holiness on the way home, than stand at a distance, frightened and unforgiven.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. JEREMIAH 31:3

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Moody once pictured God as a stern judge whom Christ had to appease. What picture of God did you grow up with, and how has it shaped the way you pray?

2. Read John 13:1–17 slowly, remembering that Jesus knew what Judas and Peter would do. What does that tell you about how He regards your own failures?

3. Think of the person you find it hardest to love. Pray for them by name, distinguishing, as Moody did, between the person and the sin.

4. If you have been waiting to become good before coming to God, stop waiting. Tell Him today that you are coming as you are.

5. Memorise Romans 5:8 this week, and say it to yourself whenever you feel that God is against you.

A PRAYER

Father, I have so often measured Your love by my own small rule, and supposed that You love me only when I am good.

Thank You that You loved me first, while I was still a sinner, and that You gave Your only Son for me.

Let me see Your love at the cross until I can no longer believe the lie that You hate me.

I will not resist that love any longer. Take me as I am, and wash me, and keep me in Your love to the end. Amen.