III.  Now, lastly, let me say a word about the constraining influence of this echoed love.

Its first effect, if it has any real power in our hearts and lives, will be to change their centre, to decentralise.  Look what the Apostle goes on to say:  ’We thus judge that He ... died for all, that they which live should not live henceforth unto themselves.’  That is the great transformation.  Secure that, and all nobleness will follow, and ‘whatsoever things are lovely and of good report’ will come, like doves to their windows, flocking into the soul that has ceased to find its centre in its poor rebellious self.  All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in lower degree, all love makes the beloved the centre, and not the self.  Hence the mother’s self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good.  Love is the antagonist of selfishness, and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christ’s love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man.  I know that in saying so I am condemning myself and my brethren.  All the same, it is true.  The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say ’Christ is my aim,’ ‘Christ is my object.’  ’The life that I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’  There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration, and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.

Again, let me remind you that, on its lower reaches and levels, we find that all true affection has in it a strange power of assimilating its objects to one another.  Just as a man and woman who have lived together for half a century in wedded life come to have the same notions, the same prejudices, the same tastes, and sometimes you can see their very faces being moulded into likeness, so, if I love Jesus Christ, I shall by degrees grow liker and liker to Him, and be ‘changed into the same image, from glory to glory.’

Again, the love constrains, and not only constrains but impels, because it becomes a joy to divine and to do the will of the beloved Christ.  ‘My yoke is easy.’  Is it?  It is very hard to be a Christian.  His requirements are a great deal sterner than others.  His yoke is easy, not because it is a lighter yoke, but because it is padded with love.  And that makes all service a sacrament, and the surrender of my own will, which is the essence of obedience, a joy.