Christ's love

 Christ's love to his- people hath no cause nor reason for it, but itself. Love is the only cause of his love. Our love to him hath good cause, and strong reason for it. His own worth in himself, his love to us, and the great things he hath done for us, and hath promised to us, justly deserve more love than we can give him. But none of these things are with us to engage his love to us.  This love of Christ not only hath no cause in us to raise it; but it is a love that acts and moves against all things that may justly quench love and raise no thing. There is not only no worth nor beauty in us that he should desire us, (as the unbelieving world thought, and thinks falsely of Christ himself, Isa. l iii. 2.) but there is a great deal in us to make us justly hateful and loathsome in his eyes. There is enmity to him in our heart and nature; there are provocations in our conversation and walk; there are vileness, loathsomeness, poverty, and all misery, in our state; yet Christ's love overcomes all: Eek. xvi. 6, 7, 8. Thy time   was the time of love, saith the Lord. A strange  time of love, and a strange love! A wretched, naked, polluted infant, cast out in the open field, to the loa thing of its person, as verse 5. Was that a time of love? Was that a time for the Prince of heaven to fall in love with the filthy perishing brat? Unto any but to the heart of a God, this would have been a time of  loathing, and not of love.  Robert Traill

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