If you turn to the Revised Version of the First Epistle of John you will find these words:  “We love because he first loved us.”  “We love,” not “We love him.”  That is the way the old version has it, and it is quite wrong.  “We love—­because he first loved us.”  Look at that word “because.”  It is the cause of which I have spoken.  “Because he first loved us,” the effect follows that we love, we love Him, we love all men.  We can not help it.  Because He loved us, we love, we love everybody.  Our heart is slowly changed.  Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love.  Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ’s character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness.  There is no other way.  You can not love to order.  You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into likeness to it.  And so look at this perfect character, this perfect life.  Look at the great sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all through life, and upon the cross of Calvary; and you must love Him.  And loving Him, you must become like Him.  Love begets love.  It is a process of induction.  Put a piece of iron in the presence of an electrified body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes electrified.  It is changed into a temporary magnet in the mere presence of a permanent magnet, and as long as you leave the two side by side they are both magnets alike.  Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will become a permanent magnet, a permanently attractive force; and like Him you will draw all men unto you; like Him you will be drawn unto all men.  That is the inevitable effect of love.  Any man who fulfils that cause must have that effect produced in him.  Try to give up the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or by mystery, or by caprice.  It comes to us by natural law, or by spiritual law, for all law is divine.  Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he entered the room he just put his hand on the sufferer’s head, and said, “My boy, God loves you,” and went away.  And the boy started from his bed, and called out to the people in the house, “God loves me!  God loves me!” It changed that boy.  The sense that God loved him overpowered him, melted him down, and began the creating of a new heart in him.  And that is how the love of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the new creature, who is patient and humble and gentle and unselfish.  And there is no other way to get it.  There is no mystery about it.  We love others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because He first loved us.

Now I have a closing sentence or two to add about Paul’s reason for singling out love as the supreme possession.  It is a very remarkable reason.  In a single word it is this:  it lasts.  “Love,” urges Paul, “never faileth.”  Then he begins one of his marvelous lists of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one.  He runs over the things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, passing away.