Lord, You Are My Love

Lord, You are my love,

You alone I love, and all my loves

Are in the loving of You. Yet You

Came first in your love; In Your

Mysterious predestining, fixing my life,

Planning my destiny before the world began.

 

You are my love and when I wake—

Time and again in the many nights—

There is sometimes the faint line of dread,

Sometimes the inner terror of the Holy One,

And I fear lest I have offended You.

Then Your love comes—reassuring—

And in Your word, and on my knees,

And in the secret places

Of my secret heart, there is a tryst—

A man and God affair

Of love inexpressible. I weep

And seem to hear You too,

Not weeping as I, but with me, for me,

And the pain becomes a precious pain,

A rich suffering in joy,

And I am one with You.

Oh Triune Lover, persistent One

Who never leaves me night and day

But moves within my dreams, and lives within

My daily awakenings, hear of my love.

More than faint intimations

Are the visitations and the ‘never-leavings’

That I have known these years of all my life.

Sometimes my thoughts of leaving You grow strong

And with the thought bewilderment fast grows,

And, like the Psalmist, in my heart I cry,

‘Whither, Lord, shall I go from Thy presence?

Thou art not only the Eternal One

Being the Everywhere I’d go, but of Thee

And from Thee, I am what Thou have made me.

Separation intolerable

My inner spirit dreads.

Such loneliness apart from Thee

Is more than Hell itself, yet Hell’s substance

That void the rebellious know’.

Why in this night—this early morn—

Do I speak to You, speak thus?

Why does this moan escape my lips?

Why does my heart complain

When all You’ve ever shown

Is holy love to me? Ah, yes,

The rub lies there, the hurt, the pain,

That You are holy, You are pure,

And I am not. Strange truth and fact

That though You holy be and I am not

Your love enwraps my soul and spirit

Like a protecting mantle, a healing cloak

That cleanses as it loves, loves as it purifies

And makes me one with You,

Your inner heart to mine and mine to You.

This is the mystery—the pained alternation

Of love and fear, of fear and love—

The mystery that’s my life

From when conceived until this now

And ‘til the death that’s life

Releases me from pain and joy

Of the present mingling.

The present mingling is the grace

And love that I and God are one.

This is the dread that comes to me—the commingling

Of human flesh and Your dread Deity

Catching me up to all eternity

In a resistless love. Why then

Do I moan in the deep night

At the painful delight of present union,

Future joy and ecstasy—not Dionysian but pure

As love makes serene for ever?

Why should my heart complain

Except its shame should make me long

For the Then to be Now—the Then I dread

As now I dread, and yet adore?

Ah Lord! I love You deep,

Deeper than all my secret heart,

Deeper than Heaven and Hell themselves.

Your love once captured me

Even before I saw the Tree:

But all the time the Tree was there

With You, in You, for me, for them.

One word from You is spoken not

But in the Cross, and by the Cross,

And through the Cross, and from its self

Till Christ in all his love—

And Spirit-love along—

Ushers my trembling heart to You

Till all Your Fatherhood Embraces me for ever.

Dear Lord there’s no complaint,

Only the plaint gentle, the tender plea

That I may tell with power You give,

The everlasting love—the mercy full—

That lifts to love’s most holy height

And there retains for ever

The transformed spirit.

Lord, I plead,

Never release me from the noble call,

That dignity most high—that ministry

That makes the heart of me melt to be

One with Your love forever;

One as I tell Your love, in quivering tones

From depths that measure cannot know,

Your depthless, breadthless, heightless love

That captures me for ever,

And in its capture captures all

Its utter holiness had planned

For time and all eternity.

From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, p.97-99.

Grace Is Much More Than Sympathy And Pity

The tendency to dwell upon the passive obedience of Christ is but the theological way of expressing the tendency to dwell on God’s sympathy and to ignore His salvation. There is little doubt that the sympathetic tendency is the more popular to-day, and to press salvation in a real sense is to be accused of a reactionary bias to theology. But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of an infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace.  
 

We are often warned of the dangers of anthropomorphism, especially by those who are preoccupied with the super-personal element in God. But what we need much more to-day is a caution against anthropopathism, or a conception of God which thinks of Him chiefly as the divine consummation of all our human pity and tenderness to man’s mischance, bewilderment, sorrow and sin. A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God. And a religion of far more sympathy than we have yet felt would not be the Christian religion.
 

It is needless to dwell on the preciousness of sympathy. The man who needs none is something less than human; and the man who receives none remains so. But a sympathy which has no help in it mocks us with an enlargement of our own sensitive impotence, which means so much better than it can. And yet a sympathy which could only help would not secure us against the fear that all its help might be at last in vain. It might not reach me, or not my worst need; or it might be arrested in some future by a power more mighty to foil than to help.
 

We must have a sympathy that can not only help but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem. Nay, far more, we must have, for the entire confidence of faith, a sympathy that has redeemed, and already triumphs in a conclusive salvation. If God, indeed, could not sympathise, He would be less than God. There would be a region, large or small, into which He could not pass. There would be an insuperable obstacle set to Almighty God by a something which by so far reduced His power and resisted His access. He would be a limited being, tied up, as impersonal things are, by their own nature, and incapable of passing beyond it.
 

But all the same, if God were all sympathy, if His divine power lay chiefly in His ability to infuse Himself with super-human intimacy of feeling into the most unspeakable tangles and crises of human life, then also He would be less than God, and we should have no more than what might be called a monism of heart. Even a loving God is really God not because He loves, but because He has power to subdue all things to the holiness of His love, and even sin itself to His love as redeeming grace. A sympathetic God is really God because He is a holy, saving, redeeming God; because in Him already the great world-transaction is done, and the kingdom of His holy love already set up on His foregone conquest of all evil.
 

The great and crucial thing is done in God and not before Him, in His will and not in His presence, by Him and not/or Him by any servants, not even by a son. It is an act of His own being, a victory in His own immutable and invincible being. And to be saved, in any non- egoistical sense of the word, means that God gains His own victory over again in me, and that I have lost in life’s great issue unless He do. God’s participation in man’s affairs is much more than that of a fellow-sufferer on a divine scale, whose love can rise to a painless sympathy with pain. He not only perfectly understands our case and our problem, but He has morally, actively, finally solved it. The solution is for ever present with Him. Already He sees, and for ever sees, the travail of His soul and is satisfied. All the jars, collisions, contradictions, crises, pities, tragedies and terrors of life are in Him for ever adjusted in a peace which is not resigned and quietist, but triumphant and exultant; and nothing can pluck us from His hands.
 

All history, through His great act at its moral centre, is, in God; resolved into the harmonies of a foregone and final conquest. And our faith is not merely that God is with us, nor that one day He will clear all things up and triumph; but that for Him all things are already triumphant, clear, and sure. All things are working together for good, as good is in the cross of Christ and its saving effect. Our faith is not that one day we shall solve the riddles of providence, and see all things put under us, but that now we see Jesus; and that we commit ourselves to one who has both the solution of every tragic thing and the glory of every dark thing clear and sure in a kingdom that cannot be moved, and, therefore alone, moves for ever on.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 58-62.