Now it is important that we do come to this fuller experience of God's love because it is from such loving conduct that the Gospel of Christ is communicated to the unsaved world. Someone has said that God has really given men five gospels. There is the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke, the Gospel according to John, and the Gospel according to you. How do men come to know God? They come to know Him through Jesus Christ. And how do they come to know Jesus Christ? They come to know Him as they see Him in the Scriptures and in your conduct.
Now at this point you may well be saying, “Well, if that is the standard, I might as well admit right now that I cannot attain to it." That is true. You cannot attain to it, not in yourself. That love is only possible to those in whom the Lord Jesus Christ is working and in whom His love dwells.
There is one more point here that also should be mentioned. The same verses that tell us that Christ died for us when we were sinners also tells us that He died for us when we were without strength, which is to say, helpless. In spiritual terms, there was no possibility of our helping ourselves.
Now we have not really seen the true extent of this divine love until we go one step further. It is true that the love to which we are called is God-love (agapē) and that this is an inscrutable love that exists entirely apart from the possibility of being loved back. But where do we see this love, if indeed, it is God-love? Where is it demonstrated? The answer is that we see it only in Jesus Christ and in Him preeminently at the cross.
For most people the verses that we are now to study are the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. And there is a sense in which this is both true and proper. They deal with Christian love, and as such they contain a highly "concentrated expression of the Christian ethic," as William Barclay notes in his commentary. Moreover, these verses deal with it profoundly.
