God’s Love for Sinners
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was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and
ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” Thus the Bible represents
God’s willingness to receive the repentant, returning sinner.
But even this parable, tender and touching as it is, comes short of
expressing the infinite compassion of the heavenly Father. The Lord
declares by the prophet: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love:
therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee.” While the sinner
is yet far from his Father’s house, wasting his substance in a strange
country, the Father’s heart is yearning over him; and every longing
awakened in the soul to return to God is but the tender pleading of His
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Spirit, wooing, entreating, drawing the wanderer to his Father’s heart
of love.
With the rich promises of the Bible before you, can you still give
place to doubt? Can you believe that when the poor sinner longs to
return, longs to forsake his sins, the Lord sternly withholds him from
coming to His feet in repentance? Away with such thoughts! Nothing
can be more dishonoring to God than these ideas. Nothing can hurt
your own soul more than to entertain such thoughts of our heavenly
Father. Our whole spiritual life will catch a tone of hopelessness from
such conceptions of God. They discourage all effort to seek God or
to serve Him. We must not think of God only as a judge ready to
pronounce sentence against us. He hates sin; but from love to sinners
He gave Himself, in the person of Christ, that all who would might be
saved and have eternal blessedness in the kingdom of glory.
The Lord Himself declares His character that Satan has malig-
nantly set in a false light. He has revealed Himself as “The Lord,
The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in
goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity
and transgression and sin.” What stronger or more tender language
could have been employed than He has chosen in which to express
His love toward us? He declares: “Can a woman forget her sucking
child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?
yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.”
In the plan of redemption, “mercy and truth are met together;
righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The all-wise, all-
powerful God, He who dwells in light unapproachable, is full of love,
of goodness. Therefore give glory to God, ye that are doubting and
trembling; for Jesus lives to make intercession for us. Give God the