Today most of us will join with other Christians to worship our God together. As we do so, it is fitting that we consider just how much Christ loves his church. Dustin Benge does that well in this brief excerpt from The Loveliest Place.
To grasp Christ’s love for his church is to plumb depths that have no bottom, find a treasure with no bounds, and climb heights that have no peak. As believers, we never move past the love of Christ. We never tire of the love of Christ. A true believer is one who never gets over the profound words of the childhood song “Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
All of our redemption and salvation flows freely from that never-ending fountain of divine love. And such boundless love can only rightly be understood by visiting a bloody cross and an empty tomb.
With an interleafed blank Bible before him to write down his endless meditations, Jonathan Edwards savored the love of Christ: “Everything that was contrived and done for the redemption and salvation of believers, and every benefit they have by it, is wholly and perfectly from the free, eternal, distinguishing love and infinite grace of Christ towards them.”
Everything we have as the church. Everything we are as the church. Everything we could ever hope to be as the church. Everything—wrapped up in the “free, eternal, distinguishing love and infinite grace of Christ.”
This infinite love is comprehensive and causes the bridegroom to rescue his bride from the depths of her sin and depravity by taking his lover’s place at the bar of holy judgment. Greater than spinning the worlds into existence is this selfless act of sacrifice that makes Jesus both a Savior and head of his church.
