The Loving Father

Every now and again I read a quote in a book that just seems to leap off the page in front of me. This morning it happened twice while I was reading the same book, “The Discipline of Grace” by Jerry Bridges.

The first was a quote from Charles Hodge in his commentary on Romans. Read it slowly and carefully.

“The great difficulty with many Christians is that they cannot persuade themselves that Christ (or God) loves them; and the reason why they cannot feel confident of the love of God, is, that they know they do not deserve his love, on the contrary, that they are in the highest degree unlovely. How can the infinitely pure God love those who are defiled with sin, who are proud, selfish, discontented, ungrateful, disobedient? This, indeed, is hard to believe. But it is the very thing we are required to believe, not only as the condition of peace and hope, but as the condition of salvation. If our hope of God’s mercy and love is founded on our own goodness or attractiveness, it is a false hope. We must believe that his love is gratuitous, mysterious, without any known or conceivable cause, certainly without the cause of loveliness in its object; that it is, in short, what it is so often declared to be in the Bible, analogous to (comparable to) the love of a parent for its child. A father’s or mother’s love is independent of the attractiveness of its object, and often in spite of its deformity.”

When we doubt God’s love for us because we think there is something about us that makes us unloveable in his sight, we do God a disservice. God does not love us because of what we’re like, he loves us in spite of what we’re like, and he gives us his Son as proof.

The second quote comes from John Owen. As Bridges points out, Owen was not soft on sin, he took it extremely seriously. Here is what Owen said about the Christian’s attitude towards God’s love in “Communion with God”.

“The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.”

I find those words to be both humbling, and tremendously reassuring.

Here’s Bridges comments on what Owen said;

“Does that sentence surprise you? Would you have expected Owen to say that the greatest sorrow and burden we can lay on the Father is to commit some scandalous sin? Isn’t that the way we tend to think of God, more as our Judge than as our Father? That is because we do not keep the gospel constantly before us. Owen was definitely not soft on sin, but he was more concerned that we keep before us the gospel: the love of God revealed in His Son Jesus Christ.”


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