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No subject places higher demands upon the gospel preacher than the subject of the love of God. If the cross is the pulpit from which the love of God is made known, why is it not more widely heard among us? Has our emphasis moved from the apostolic center? Sometimes a lack of concentration on the love of God is justified by the argument that love is too prominent in the false religion of our times. It is true that speaking of the love of God apart from Christ is a false gospel. But the prevalence of the false ought to make us the more ready to preach the true. The confidence which non-Christians sometimes say they have in divine love is not the love of God at all.
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The source of our weakness as evangelists is that we are not living close enough to the fountainhead of love. Faithfulness and conscientiousness may be enough to enable us to say something on the law and judgment of God, but we cannot speak well of the love of God to sinners unless we are personally familiar with it and persuaded of it. What is at the forefront of our experience is going to be at the forefront of our preaching . . . of all the graces needed to make Christ known, the greatest is love. The preachers who have had much of this grace of love, even though sometimes deficient in other respects, have been those used of God to a remarkable degree.
-Iain Murray
HT: Mack T
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