'Yea, Lord! Thou knowest that I love Thee.' Is not that beautiful, that
the man who by Christ's Resurrection, as the last of the answers shows,
had been led to the loftiest conception of Christ's omniscience, and
regarded Him as knowing the hearts of all men, should, in the face of
all that Jesus Christ knew about his denial and his sin, have dared to
appeal to Christ's own knowledge? What a superb and all-conquering
confidence in Christ's depth of knowledge and forgivingness of
knowledge that answer showed! He felt that Jesus could look beneath the
surface of his sin, and see that below it there was, even in the midst
of the denial, a heart that in its depths was true. It is a tremendous
piece of confident appeal to the deeper knowledge, and therefore the
larger love and more abundant forgiveness, of the righteous Lord--'Thou
knowest that I love Thee.'
Brethren! a Christian man ought to be sure of his love to Jesus Christ.
You do not study your conduct in order to infer from it your love to
others. You do not study your conduct in order to infer from it your
love to your wife, or your husband, or your parents, or your children,
or your friend. Love is not a matter of inference; it is a matter of
consciousness and intuition. And whilst self-examination is needful for
us all for many reasons, a Christian man ought to be as sure that he
loves Jesus Christ as he is sure that he loves his dearest upon earth.
It used to be the fashion long ago--this generation has not depth
enough to keep up the fashion--for Christian people to talk as if it
were a point they longed to know, whether they loved Jesus Christ or
not. There is no reason why it should be a point we long to know. You
know all about your love to one another, and you are sure about that.
Why are you not sure about your love to Jesus Christ? 'Oh! but,' you
say, 'look at my sins and failures'; and if Peter had looked only at
his sins, do you not think that his words would have stuck in his
throat? He did look, but he looked in a very different way from that of
trying to ascertain from his conduct whether he loved Jesus Christ or
not. Brethren, any sin is inconsistent with Christian love to Christ.
Thank God, we have no right to say of any sin that it is incompatible
with that love! More than that; a great, gross, flagrant, sudden fall
like Peter's is a great deal less inconsistent with love to Christ than
are the continuously unworthy, worldly, selfish, Christ-forgetting
lives of hosts of complacent professing Christians to-day. White ants
will eat up the carcase of a dead buffalo quicker than a lion will. And
to have denied Christ once, twice, thrice, in the space of an hour, and
under strong temptation, is not half so bad as to call Him 'Master' and
'Lord,' and day by day, week in, week out, in works to deny Him. The
triple answer declares to us that in spite of a man's sins he ought to
be conscious of his love, and be ready to profess it when need is.