"How often would I . . . and ye would not!"-Luke 13: 34
Look once again at the sad words of our text. The saddest of all refusals is a direct refusal of the divine love which came down to this earth in the person of the meek and lowly Jesus.
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely ; Love divine.
Yes, "Love came down at Christmas." Love walked and talked with us, up and down the lanes of Galilee and Judaea. Love grieved and bled and broke its heart in agonising expiation for us, on Calvary! In Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, the divine love has clothed itself in visible sublimity. "The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld His glory . . . full of grace and truth."
In Jesus, God looks on us through human eyes, beckons' to us with human hands, calls to us through human lips, walks toward us with human feet over life's troubled sea, sympathises with us through human susceptibilities, and feels after us with a divine love which now beats through a human heart!
God's thoughts are love, and Jesus is
The loving voice they find.
His life lights up the vast abyss
Of the eternal Mind.
Who can sound the deeps of that fathomless sob, "Ob, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. . . how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and ye mould not!" Yet even that sad refusal was not as ungrateful as the refusal of many a heart today; for when Jesus wept over Jerusalem He had not yet gone to the crowning expression of divine love on Calvary. As we have said before, to those. of us who live on this side of Calvary, the greatest sin is no longer that of transgressing the commanding law sent down through the venerable Moses, but the refusing of the redeeming love poured out through the crucified Saviour. Through the Cross, not only does salvation from eternal Gehenna come to believers, but there draws near to us in its sublimest, tenderest, most appealing way, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of love, the kingdom of Jesus.
How can men refuse? Yet they do! And then. what? They know they cannot be neutral, so they build false little kingdoms of their own-little kingdoms of intellectuality. personal superiority. religion, phllosophy, pleasure, angry resentment. Or they drive conscious refusal of Christ down into the vaults of the sub-conscious. thinking it Will die in the dark; and then, when they gradually become insensitive to Christ, they think it a sign of strength, when all the time it is the weakness of a mind cowering away from reality; a chronic mental state of cowardly refusal brought on by successive acts of refusal.
It is a morbid thickening of the mind's "outer skin", not protecting it, but cutting it off from the one true kingdom of light and health. Let us say a big. eager "YES" to Jesus, now and always!
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