I. Now the first thing to notice is this constraining love.

I need not spend time in showing that when Paul says here ’The love of Christ,’ he means Christ’s love to him, not his to Christ.  That is in accordance with his continual usage of the expression; and it is in accordance with facts.  For it is not my love to Jesus, but His love to me, that brings the real moulding power into my life, and my love to Him is only the condition on which the true power acts upon me.  To get the fulcrum and the lever which will heave a life up to the heights you have to get out of yourselves.

Now Paul never saw Jesus Christ in this earthly life.  Timothy, who is associated with him in this letter, and perhaps is one of the ‘us,’ never saw Him either.  The Corinthian believers whom he is addressing had, of course, never seen Him.  And yet the Apostle has not the slightest hesitation in taking that great benediction of Christ’s love and spreading it over them all.  That love is independent of time and of space; it includes humanity, and is co-extensive with it.  Unturned away by unworthiness, unrepelled by non-responsiveness, undisgusted by any sin, unwearied by any, however numerous, foiling of its attempts, the love of Christ, like the great heavens that bend above us, wraps us all in its sweetness, and showers upon us all its light and its dew.

And yet, brethren, I would have you remember that whilst we thus try to paint, in poor, poor words, the universality of that love, we have to remember that it does not partake of the weakness that infects all human affections, which are only strong when they are narrow, and as the river expands it becomes shallow, and loses the force in its flow which it had when it was gathered between straiter banks, so as that a universal charity is almost akin to a universal indifference.  But this love that grasps us all, this river that ’proceedeth from the Throne of God and of the Lamb,’ flows in its widest reaches as deep and as impetuous in its career as if it were held within the narrowest of gorges.  For Christ’s universal love is universal only because it is individualising and particular.  We love our nation by generalising and losing sight of the individuals.  Christ loves the world because He loves every man and woman in it, and His grace enwraps all because His grace hovers over each.

  ’The sun whose beams most glorious are
    Despiseth no beholder,’

but the rays come straight to each eyeball.  Be sure of this:  that He who, when the multitude thronged Him and pressed Him, felt the tremulous, timid, scarcely perceptible touch of one woman’s wasted finger on the hem of His garment, holds each of us in the grasp of His love, which is universal, because it applies to each.  You and I have each the whole radiance of it pouring down on our heads, and none intercepts the beams from any other.  So, brethren, let us each feel not only the love that grasps the world, but the love that empties itself on me.