Perfect Love Casts Out Fear (but it scares you to death in the process)

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. For if at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, it is love asserting itself, not love yielding its claims. It is not love that grants a boon unwillingly; still less is it love that answers a prayer to the wrong and hurt of him who prays. Love is one, and love is changeless.

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more. It strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected – not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing toward the culmination when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this is hard to understand, it is as the simple, absolute truth is hard to understand. It may be centuries of ages before a man comes to see a truth – ages of strife, of effort, of aspiration. But when once he does see it, it is so plain that he wonders how he could have lived without seeing it. That he did not understand it sooner was simply and only that he did not see it. To see a truth, to know what it is, to understand it, and to love it, are all one. – George MacDonald, excerpt from sermon, “The Consuming Fire”

I’m a little short on time for the next few days, so, like yesterday, I may not be blogging much.

A short description of MacDonald might be to say he was a person who had rejected Calvinistic determinism but clung to the beautiful truth of God’s sovereignty. Here he is depicting the Lord as that perfect Bridegroom, likewise described in Ephesians 5:27, as presenting his Bride “to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, holy and blameless.”

God will never give up on us, but that also means He will never really let up on us. In the end we will get right. Can something be absolutely terrifying and joyously hopeful at the same time?

Well, there was this Cross …