I wonder in telling this if I have not spoken the experience of many of you this morning.  It is impossible to love God if we feel that He is stern and despotic, and must be appeased by the sufferings of an innocent man.  The New Testament nowhere lends any support to that idea.  Everywhere the New Testament assures us that God is the lover of men, that He initiates the movement for man’s redemption.  “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son....”  “Herein is love:  not that we loved God, but that he loved us.”  “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  “The Father spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.”  “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”  “I and my Father are one.”  These are only a few of the passages in which we are told that God is our Savior.  When an old Scotchman once heard the text announced, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” he exclaimed, “Oh, that was love indeed!  I could have given myself, but I never could have given my boy.”  This, then, is the very highest love of which it is possible for the human mind to think:  the love of a father that surrenders his son to sufferings and death.

And this brings us to the second great truth which is outgrowing increasingly clear in the consciousness of the Church.  The death of Jesus is the revelation of an experience in the heart of God.  God is the sin-bearer of the world.  He bears our sins on His mind and heart.  There are three conceptions of God:  the savage, the pagan, and the Christian.  God, according to the savage conception, is vengeful, and capricious, and vindictive.  He is a great savage hidden in the sky.  We have all outgrown that.  According to the pagan idea, He is indifferent to the wants and woes of men.  He does not care for men.  He is not interested in them.  He does not sympathize with them.  He does not suffer over their griefs.  He does not feel pain or sorrow.  I am afraid that many of us have never gotten beyond the pagan conception of the Almighty.  But according to the Christian conception, God suffers.  He feels, and because He feels, He sympathizes, and because He sympathizes, He suffers.  He feels both pain and grief.  He carries a wound in His heart.  We men and women sometimes feel burdened because of the sin we see around us; shall not the heavenly Father be as sensitive and responsive as we men?  But somebody says that God can not be happy then.  Of course he can not be happy.  Happiness is not an adjective to apply to God.  Happy is a word that belongs to children.  Children are happy, grown people never are.  One can be happy when the birds are singing and the dew is on the grass, and there is no cloud in all the sky, and the crape has not yet hung at the door.  But after we have passed over the days of childhood, there is happiness no longer.  Some of us have lived too long and borne too much ever to be happy any more.  But