To the end

I think it was from Tim Keller that I heard this for the first time, years ago now: “When Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think, ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No. He was in agony, and he looked down at us—denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him—and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.”

For his own, Jesus persists in that determined love today and will persist in it through eternity. Of immense comfort is something  John Bunyan wrote in 1743, “Love in Christ decays not, nor can it be tempted to do so by anything that happens, or shall happen hereafter, in the object so beloved.” 

The heart of Christ for sinners and sufferers does not flash with tenderness occasionally or temporarily, sputtering out over time. It persists steadily, consistently, everlastingly when all loveliness has withered.

How do we know?