God's unfailing love is the central theme, contrasting human love's fallibility with divine love's eternal nature. The sermon explores how human love, though precious, often breaks down due to sin and selfishness, citing examples of parental abandonment and personal relationships. In contrast, God's love is presented as an outgoing, unconditional agape love, demonstrated supremely at the cross and evident in His word, His provision, and His desire for companionship with believers. The message urges listeners to recognize and cherish this divine love, which offers true comfort and security, and to cultivate their own friendship with God.
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Thank you, Brother Gilmore. Good preparation for what I have to say tonight. I want to talk to you about the comfort of love. Before we open the book, I have been asked by my colleague, Jay Walden, to say something to you about the book table. I've been itching to do this. It's one thing that disturbs me. It's the lack of reading among the Lord's people. Mr. C.W. Ross made a statement forty years ago that the average Christian's library consists of a dictionary and a Montgomery Ward catalog, and most of them don't have a dictionary. And if he was disturbed about it forty years ago, I don't know what he would say today.
People are not buying books. They're not reading. I don't know if you are or not. But I know that you could benefit greatly. by the literature that's behind me on this table. You spend a lot of money to come here to hear a couple of men teach the word, and it's been preserved for you here in print so that you can have the same thing anytime in your own home. You can get a great deal of benefit from books. I know books are expensive. I ought to know I have a library of about three thousand of them. My boy comes home and he said, this place is so cluttered.
Mother's got flowers everywhere. The dad doesn't have books. And I guess that's true. And that's the way we like it. I love books. I'm a bibliophile. I wish you were. I wish I could get you interested in books. Now, if you're not a reader yourself, I'd like to suggest something that you could do. to help the young Christians where you live. These pamphlets that are displayed here so nicely cover almost every topic that you could think of. And anyone can read a thirty-two page booklet.
If you're not acquainted with them, you don't know what's good and what isn't good, just tell Brother Grant Stedeker that you'd like to have ten dollars worth or five dollars worth if you're a cheatscape. get him to pick you up a package and take them home with you and give them to the young people where you live. One at a time, hand one to him and say, I want you to read this and I want to ask you something about it. That way you won't stick it away. Oh, what a change you could make in the life of a young person get hold of the right pamphlet at the right time. This is a ministry that you could do for the Lord. I feel that I'm I'm I have a right to say this to you because I buy pamphlets by the pound not by the piece I bought as much as fifty pounds of pamphlets at one time from the publisher the last order that I got was twenty pounds of pamphlets and I carry them in my car when I drive back and forth across the country I stop to see isolated Christians Christians who don't get much ministry they just eat them up They enjoy getting something nice that will be helpful to them.
Keep some in your pocket and hand one to a Christian. Ask the Lord to lead you who to give this to. And it might be just a lifesaver, some believer who's not doing too well at the moment. I don't have to tell you to buy the trinkets. Everybody does that. But don't waste all your time on that end of the table. Get into some of this good stuff here. I know it'll cost you three, four, five dollars for a book. It'll cost you more than that to fill your car with gas, and it's all gone in a short while. And this is permanent. This is for eternity. Good books are a great blessing. My text is found in Philippians chapter two. This morning...
We looked into the Word of God about the comfort of grace. And through the form, the Lord's people enjoyed thinking about grace. We thank God for His great grace. It comforts our hearts to know that He is the God of all grace, to know that He deals with us in grace and to know that we can count on these grace right through to the end. Philippians chapter two and verse one says, if there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, now the ifs here do not raise a question.
I suppose in modern English we would say since there is consolation in Christ and since there is comfort in love and so on. If any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, this is an old English expression, meaning compassion and heart-felt kindness, fulfill ye my joy that ye be like-minded, having the same love being of one accord of one mind. Now this was an exhortation. Verse two is asking us that we have the same thing toward each other. that God has toward us. Because this has been such a comfort and a consolation to us, we can be a comfort and a consolation to our fellow Christians.
That's the exhortation here. But I'm particularly interested now in just what he says about the consolation in Christ and the comfort of love. Love and grace are not the same. I think we need to be very careful about our use of Bible terms. It really disturbs me to hear them all hashed up. We had a man get on our platform in Colorado Springs and say, I tell you, folks, you've got to be born again through the blood of Jesus. And you just gave me the willies to hear him say that. You're not born again through the blood of Jesus.
The blood of Jesus cleanses us from seeing the blood of Jesus makes us nigh. We're made nigh by the blood of Christ. But we are born again of the Spirit of God. operating upon the word of God. We ought to be explicit. We ought to say what we mean. We ought to understand the Scriptures. People use interchangeably so many terms. And I don't think we ought to be bothered by finding these technical words in the Scripture. If you were going to study, say, electricity, wouldn't you expect to have to learn some terms to go with it? You would expect to learn about ohms and bolts and, well, that's all I know about electricity.
But you'd have to learn something about electricity, about the terms, in order to know what you're talking about. And the same thing is true of spiritual things. Why should you balk at such words as propitiation and use it interchangeably with reconciliation? Propitiation is Godward and reconciliation is manward. And let's get them straight in our minds. so that we can speak of them intelligently to other people. Let's understand what we mean by redemption. Let's know what we're talking about when we say sanctification. I went out distributing tracts one time of the young fellow, and he met a man at the door. He was across the street from me, and a man came to the door and said to him, are you sanctified?
He said, I don't know. And the fellow said, Don't you believe in holiness? And he calls out at me, Hey John, do we believe in holiness or not? You see, this is the, I know he was a young Christian, but it's pitiful when we don't know what we're talking about. When we say love, we don't mean grace. I know they're related. I know that the God of love is the God of grace. I know that because of God's great love for us, he shows grace to us, but they're not identical. And I'm concerned tonight, not with grace, but with the love that's back of it. When I was praying today, the Lord gave me a nice verse. He's been good to me like this.
He brings verses to me that are just what I need at the time. And he gave me the nicest verse from the thirty-first chapter of Jeremiah. I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee the loving kindness of God to us is the result of his everlasting love for us human love is very failing we talk about our love especially when we're young we profess great love to someone in order to win that someone.
A young fellow said to his girl, I go through fire and water for you. And if it isn't raining, I'll be over to see you tonight. We talk pretty glibly about love. We say we love. But do we really love? Human love breaks down. There's nothing more wonderful than mother love in human love. And yet the Bible says, if my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. And fathers and mothers do forsake their children. I ought to know, for the last third of a century, my wife and I have been taking in home with children.
They've had the privilege with the help of many devoted workers in the home, of rearing five hundred children. Not all of these children came to us because parental love broke down, but many of them did. A mother brought us three little boys on Christmas Eve. Her eye was black and her face was bruised. She said, I can't put up with it anymore. You just got to take these kids. He came home drunk and beat me up again, and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. And I said, for pity's sake, take these children home over Christmas. She said, what kind of a Christmas would they have at our house? I'm leaving.
She walked out. Didn't even sign the papers or anything. They had to look her up later on and get things straightened out. One of these little boys had a fever. My wife took him to the infirmary because the nurse was off duty. She sat down beside the crib, beside the bed. He was just a little fellow, about seven years old. And she didn't turn the light on. Meanwhile, Hazel Swanson, who was with us at that time, was my secretary for twenty-five years, started seeing what she could find in the way of presents for these three little boys and get their names on them because we had our christmas party that evening christmas eve we want to be sure that they all had something like the rest of the children my wife has taken care of this little fellow and she called the doctor and the doctor said i can't come out this now but uh...
put him to bed in there and uh... see if he gets any worse call me while he was lying there in the dark he began to talk said Well, if my daddy doesn't want me, then I'll go with my mother. And if my mother doesn't want me, then I'll go with my daddy. And she said to him, I'm done. We feel sorry that you can't be with your daddy and mother. But she said, you know, we love you. And he sat up in bed. He said, you do? Well, she said, yes. That's why we have this home here. Because we love boys and girls. We climbed out of that bed and climbed on her lap. Put his arms around her neck and let's sleep.
When he awakened, he didn't have any fever. It wasn't anything wrong with him physically. He was torn up inside because he lacked love. We have to be loved. And human love breaks down. All human love breaks down. But the love of God, the love of God never fails. Not filial love, not the love of mere human beings, the agape love of God, the outgoing, the love that never looks for anything in return, the love that reaches out because this is the nature and character of God.
Our brother Mr. Cole read to us from the first chapter of First John, God is light. That's where you have to begin with God. But when we get to the fourth chapter, twice in that chapter, verse eight and verse sixteen, he says, God is love. And then he shows us how God proves that he is love. Now, these terms are not to be used interchangeably. Because God is love doesn't mean that love is God. It doesn't mean that all love is godly. There is another kind of love. The word isn't used in the New Testament, but it is the word eros. And we call it erotic love. It has to do with sexual passions. This is true love, but it is love on a different level.
And God intended for human beings to enjoy the erotic and the filial, and above all, a divine love. And God is a divine lover, and his love is the kind of love that is constantly outgoing. Filial love says, I love you as long as you love me. If you don't love me, I don't love you. My father was in school. He had trouble with a girl. He told me about this. He said, this girl didn't, gee, we couldn't get along very well. I pulled her braids and then she stood on me and we had trouble. And then we went to the teacher about it and the teacher said children shouldn't act like that. And so the girl was a little dependent about it and she stuck out her hand and she said, Bill, I'm not mad unless you are, but if you are, I'm going to knock your block off.
Now that's about as far as human love goes. Human love says, I love you if you love me, but I want returns. And the best of human love can be cooled and dampened and killed. And you've seen it happen and I've seen it happen. But not God's love. Not God's love. This is his very character. Eternally, unchangingly, God is love. I mentioned the Genesis forms. The God of all grace we talked about this morning.
He's called the God of love. Second Corinthians chapter thirteen, twice in that chapter. He speaks of himself as the God of love. and of the love of God. The God of love is the God we are interested in, the God we know, the God who has blessed us. Now, if human love were rewarded as God's love has been rewarded, it would die. Mother love, I said a while ago, probably holds longer than any other. I marvel at the love of my mother for us. I marvel for how it carried her along after I lost my father.
I marvel how much it causes her to give. I marvel at how forgiving it was for all of us. I remember reading about a man who was arrested for murder, multiple murders. He was placed in the penitentiary. They did everything they could. to conquer that cruel murder. He threatened to kill the people who brought him his food. They put him in the black hole, down in the dungeon, and he cursed them from that black hole.
He did everything they could to try to break his spirit. One day a little old lady came to that penitentiary and asked if she could see. They said, why do you want to see him? And she said, because I'm his mother. And they asked him if he wanted to see her, and he cursed her. And she said, well, I've come a long way, just let me see. They said, we won't open the door to his cell, but we'll open the little window where we pass in the food. And she went to this window, and she called him, Georgie. He said, go away. She said, Georgie, come here.
It's your mother. Finally came over to the window and he said, why are you here? She reached through the window and took in her hands those hands that were stained with the blood of many of his fellow human beings. And she held those hands. And in a few minutes that man became a blubbering child, broken completely. My mother loves. I tell you, brothers and sisters, we've got a great deal to thank God for if we had good mothers. And I did. And not only had a good mother, I had a comfortable one.
She was a nice, fat Dutch mother. I always felt sorry for children who had skinny little mama. Oh, I had a mother who could comfort. I can close my eyes yet and remember the comfort I got as a boy when my mother took me to her spacious bosom and buried my head and dried my tears. But I don't know any mother love that's to be compared with the love of God. God's unfailing love for unlovely sinners.
I hope you know. I hope you understand fully that you are not lovely. I hope that you're convinced that God did not love you because you were so irresistible. He loved you for one reason only because this is his nature. He's outgoing love. Makes him love everybody. God so loved the world. He displayed that love fully in the Lord Jesus. Hereby perceive we the love of God. Hearing His love, not that we love God, but that God loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
This is love. And this love was rewarded with hatred. First of all, by Satan. You read the fourteenth of Isaiah and the twenty eighth of Ezekiel, and you will know why he is called the devil. God created Satan beautiful and wise and honored him with the nearest place, the anointed cherub who covered it. And Satan used that as a springboard to try to take away from God. everything that belongs to him alone. He rewarded the love of God with a bitterest kind of hatred.
And he's been at it ever since. And then he finally wrote the human race into this same thing. His insinuations recorded in the third chapter of Genesis tell us that he did not believe in the love of God and he did not want man to believe in the love of God. And he said, is that what God said? God knows that if he gave you these things that he's withholding from you, it would help you and bless you. God hates you. God does not love you. That's what the devil said. And when the devil came to talk to God about Job in the first chapter of Job, he couldn't believe that anyone would serve God because he loved him.
His own heart was so filled with bitterness and with hatred that he said, you touch him and he'll curse you to your face. And God said, all right, I'll give you leave to do that very thing. And he proved the devil to be a liar. And yet Satan has succeeded, hasn't he, in getting the human race to hate God? You may never have openly rebelled against God, such as some of the atheists have done. A few years ago there was a cartoon in one of the Russian newspapers. A Russian peasant was on top of a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay the throne of the Tsar of Russia and some other lesser dignitaries, and their crowns were rolling away.
They were tipped over, and he was on this ladder shaking his fist up toward heaven, and the caption underneath it said, God is next. And you shudder, and I shudder when I think of anybody vending his wrath on a loving God like this. you never did this but deep down inside of you there is an enmity against God and if you don't know it it's because you've never seen down into the cesspool of your own heart I'm speaking to Christians you don't know what that old nature of yours is capable of doing I received a call from a Christian brother asked me to come over and talk to his wife they had a tragedy in their family And he said she is in a state of collapse.
I believe you could help her if you just come over. I went over and he led me into the bedroom. She was lying there on the bed, unable to cry. And I sat down by the bedside and I said, well, Mary, we don't understand a lot of things, but we know that God loves us. She said, I don't believe it. She's one of the nicest Christians you ever met. Under the strain. Under the stress of having taken from her that which she loved, she said, I don't believe that God loves me. For a minute, the bitterness of hatred in the human heart came out.
Oh, she was penitent about it. It wasn't but a few minutes after that that she began to cry, which was good for her. And she said, I'm sorry, I said that. I know God loves me, but I'm just all torn out. She just found out what was inside. Hatred. The carnal mind is enmity against God. It is not subject to the law of God. Neither indeed can be. That's your carnal mind. That's your heart. That's what we have on the inside of us. Hateful and hating one another. But in spite of that, God loves us. And that love continues. and that love has been proclaimed, somebody has called this book God's Love Letter.
That's what it is, isn't it? Above all, that's what this letter is to us. That's what this book is to us. There are no scientific errors in it, but it isn't a scientific treatise. Anything that is historical in this book is accurate. But if you like history, you're going to be really bothered by the gaps in history. It just doesn't give us all the history we'd like to have. Two chapters to tell how the entire universe was created, and then sixteen chapters to tell how they made a chance. The tabernacle in the Old Testament. Because this isn't the book of history at all.
This is the book of love. This is the book that tells us about a God who cares about us. That's what you ought to look for when you read this book. You ought to read it as a love letter. My father loves me. Let me see what I can find in Hosea. Oh, there's a great deal in Hosea about his love. The kind of love that makes a prophet take a totally useless and worthless woman and make her his wife, and then when she's untrue to him, go back and win her back the second time. That's the story of Hosea. just as wonderful as John three sixteen just not as well known that's all anywhere you turn you'll see the love of God now he proclaimed this love in two ways first of all in his word by statements it's good to tell people that you love them some husbands forget this they are they're very wordy about their love before they're married but afterwards The fellow says to his wife, of course I love you.
I told her that before I married you. Don't ask me anymore. It's all settled. Now, this is a mistake. If you men want a happy home, let me tell you, love feeds love. Don't make the mistake of letting a day go by without telling your wife or your husband's case may be about your love. I know it isn't news, but it doesn't have to be news to be good. My wife and I have been married nearly thirty-eight years. Thirty-seven and a half means that we're three-fourths of the way toward the fifty year mark, and we got a late start.
So we're very happy about looking back over these years together. We've had a great many difficulties. She hasn't always been reasonable to see it my way. But we have learned something about love. Husbands and wives can get along beautifully together if they learn to verbalize their love for each other. Just learn to say to your husband and wife, how much that person means to you today you don't have to repeat the same thing if you've said all the time before although that isn't always bad but you need to learn to say something a little bit different just just to let them know I appreciate you you're going to help to me if you only knew if you only knew the hearts that are aching or some little expression of love.
There may be some right here in this room. There may be some wife or some husband right here in this room who needs to have said to him or her, my dear, you mean everything to me. You have been good to me, far better than I deserve. God says it. He says it so many ways. He says it over and over and over again. He said it to his Old Testament saints. He says it to his New Testament saints. He says it to them collectively and he says it to them individually. You remember in the song of Solomon, the bride says, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
That means let him give me some little personal expression of love. When Solomon was born, the Lord said to Nathan, Go tell me. Go tell David, I have called him Jedediah. Now that doesn't sound like a very nice name for a baby, but it was wonderful to David because Jedediah means the loved of Jehovah.
David must have been thinking, this baby is the child of the wife I stole from Uriah. And God took that first baby away. I wonder how he feels about this one. And God said, I don't want to keep David in suspense. I don't want him to have any questions in his mind. Go tell David, I have called the baby Jedediah. Just a little personal expression of the love of God. Do you get these from God? Have you learned to get these from God day by day? Do you know how to get alone with God and get a personal expression of love from Him and then give to Him some of these? I said to a young fellow who is just a new Christian, do you pray every day?
He said, no, not every day. There are some days I don't need anything. Now, you laugh at that, but if you're not careful, you'll do the very same thing yourself. On a day when you don't need anything, that's a good day to get into his presence and say, Father, I don't need anything, but I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your kindness. Lord Jesus, I don't need anything. I just want to tell you that I love you. How this would delight his heart, because love needs to be love. But he tells us his love in another way by his acts. First of all, at the cross. This is the supreme proof of the love of God.
And this is why we are so comforted as we read the story of the crucifixion of our blessed Lord. Now, we don't come together on the first day of the week to take the Lord's Supper for our own benefit. If we do, we make a very serious mistake. Some friends of mine attended the meeting at home where I go, where we remember the Lord. They felt that maybe we were overdoing it to have the Lord's supper every week. So I said, well, why don't you come and see how we do it? So they came, and afterward I talked to him about it, and he said, well, it was nice, but he said, I didn't seem to get much out of it.
And I said, do you ever get much out of a birthday party? What are you talking about? I said, do you ever go to, sure, go to birthday parties, but, well, do you ever get much out of it? He said, I don't know what you mean. You don't go to a birthday party to get anything out of it. I said, that's exactly what I mean. You don't go to the Lord's Supper to get something out of it. You go to the Lord's Supper to give something to him. This is the one meeting of the week that is set apart entirely for the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel meeting is for the unsaved. The Bible study is for our teaching and enjoyment. And the prayer meeting is so we can tell the Lord about our needs. But this meeting is entirely for the Lord.
This is one opportunity to tell him that you love him. And yet we do get a great deal out of this. And one of the things we get out of it is the great comfort of the love of God. I have gone to that meeting as cold as a macro. And if my brothers and sisters saw the state of my heart, they probably would stop me at the door. And I have sat down and listened to the Lord's people, pour out their thanks to God. And I have joined in the singing of the hymns. And then tears have come to my eyes as my heart has been warmed with thoughts of His love.
That's the comfort of love. We need it. And God sees that we get all we need. So he not only showed his love at the cross, love in conversion, then he shows his love in provision. When we love a person, we try to do the very best we can for them. I haven't been able to do very much for my wife. I left the jewelry business before I knew her. I made good money before I went out preaching in nineteen thirty, early part of the year. I married my wife in nineteen thirty one so she never never knew me as a jew or she knew me as a preacher and in nineteen thirty one you may recall the depression was in full swing and we had a pretty rough time and I've never been able to do very much for my life my wife loves music and I prayed for four years that God would enable me to buy her an organ.
And I was not able to buy the organ. Well, I did buy a secondhand one. I thought it was a bargain, but it wasn't. We were fortunate to get anything out of it at all. And I was disappointed that I was not able to get her an organ. A year ago, a year ago last March, Some friends of hers and friends of ours bought her a lovely world, her organ, brand new. And she's delighted with it. She couldn't sleep the other night. She got up and played between three and four o'clock in the morning. I take my ears off at night, so no disturbance to me.
And she said, you have no idea what therapy this organ has been to me. And I'm so pleased with it. But there's one little twinge of disappointment in that. I didn't get to buy it for it. Because love wants to give. Love gives. Love serves. In an old book, I found this lovely statement. Self seeks to be served and thinks itself great. Love serves and is great. Remember this? Write it down. Do you a lot of good? Self seeks to be served and thinks itself great. Love serves and is great.
That's what God's love does for us. Serves us. Gives to us. Provides for us. One of the names of God. In fact, the first compound name using Jehovah is found in the book of Genesis where he says Jehovah Jireh. Now Jehovah Jireh means the Lord will see and provide. The Lord, the provider. That's one of his names. God is a great provider. Why? Because he loves us. Oh, how he provides for us. Everything we need in Christ, advocate, high priest, morning star, anything that you can think of that you need, the Lord Jesus, is this to you.
And then he is blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ. No loved one on earth was ever blessed as God has blessed you in the heavens. The sad part of it is that most Christians couldn't even name three of the spiritual blessings. There are nine of them in the first chapter of Ephesians alone. Most Christians couldn't even name three of their spiritual blessings. And he's blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heaven is in Christ. Oh, brother and sister, if you just knew how much God has done for you, your heart would be so warm to him and you would be so comforted, you could never complain again.
And then he has even blessed us with temporal mercies. James tells us that every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above, from the Father of light. with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Mr. Ayn O'Brien, with whom I spent eight and a half years, said one time that he knew a dear old soul who lived all alone and who prayed one day to her Heavenly Father and asked him if the Lord would please to send her a piping bullfinch. Now they sing much more sweetly than a canary. And she said, I think if I just had a piping bullfinch, it would make me comforting company.
I think I would not be so lonely if I just had one of these. And she said, you know, the very next day, through the express office, I received a piping bullfinch complete in a nice cage. And Mr. O'Brien said to her, now do you really think that God cares? about getting you a piping bullfinch? Why, she said, of course he does. I'm his spoiled child. And he said, I just had a feeling that she was right. Does God care if you need a piping bullfinch? Yes, he does. I don't go asking for one unless you need it. But if you need it, you ask him for one because your father cares.
He is concerned about every need that you could possibly have. because he loves us. But I must say this before I sit down. I had permission to go to the quarter after nine tonight, so don't get nervous. I just want to say this before I sit down. There is a way in which God shows His love to us, which is above and beyond anything that I have mentioned yet. Do you know what that is? That's in companionship. Things you can get them anywhere. Service, you can buy that.
But companionship, this has to be given, and only love can give real companionship. Do you know what the Lord has done for us? He has made us the fellows of the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen to this. Thou hast anointed him, Christ, with the oil of gladness, above his fellows. Who were his fellows? Well, not the angels, because that same first chapter of Hebrews says the angels are just his servants. Who were his fellows? Well, not the Father and the Holy Spirit, because the Father, by means of the Spirit, anointed him with the oil of gladness, above his fellows.
Who are these fellows? You and I. I often think about Prince Charlie, who just became the Prince of Wales. You know, his father had very down-to-earth ideas about how that boy ought to be reared. And he thought to it that he attended a school where ordinary mortals went. And the first day that he was in the school, one of the other boys blacked his eye. And his father said, good, he needs to learn about that. I don't know what his mother said, but he didn't record that. That's what his father said. And any father would say that. I've just been thinking to myself, what's going to happen one of these days?
These fellows are now all twenty-one years of age. And one of these days, Prince Charlie is going to become King Charles, if the monarchy goes on. And then these other fellows will be in business in different places in the kingdom, you know. Do you think it's going to hurt the many that they grew up with King Charles? Do you think it's going to militate against them? It's going to hurt their business or anything if they grew up with King Charles? That they shared a table together? That they maybe shared a room together? That they learned together? Why, this is a marvelous thing. Well, I'm sure that from among these personal friends of Charles's are going to be some of the future leaders of England.
I'm sure that there's some way of pulling strings and getting his personal friends in the high positions over there. But let me tell you, brother and sister, you and I are the companions of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And one of these days he's going to be on his throne. And do you know who he's going to put beside him? When David became the king, he called up thirty-three men. And these thirty-three men were his personal companions, and he put every one of them in important places in the kingdom, as well as his own sons. And poor Jonathan could have been there if he had followed David all the way. Instead of that, he was lying in an untimely grave because he failed to be a companion to David through thick and thin.
Now, the Lord has called you to be a companion of the Lord Jesus Christ. What are you doing to cultivate that friendship? How much time do you give him? It does take time. How much time do you take out of your day just to cultivate his friendship? Just to let him know that you care about him. Just to tell him what you think of him. Just to listen to his voice. Just to serve him. Just to speak a word about him. For loyalty goes with friendship. What are you doing to cultivate the friendship of the Lord Jesus Christ?
He said, I have called you friends. Now, it's all right if you call yourself the love slave of the Lord Jesus. Every one of the New Testament writers did so. No reason why you shouldn't do it. But that's your choice. He calls you his friend. Do you know what's going to happen in the coming days? The Lord is coming back again. He says that when he comes, when he takes us up to meet him in the air, it says, And so shall we ever be in heaven. Oh, no, it does. Oh, no, it doesn't. Because we're not always going to be in heaven. For a thousand years, we're going to reign with him over this earth.
And it wouldn't make any difference. I wouldn't want to be there without him. Heaven doesn't mean anything without Christ. There's a house in Colorado Springs where I love to be sometimes. But if my wife were away, that would be the last place in the world I'd want to go to that. There is nothing quite so empty as that house, nineteen twenty-six Woodburn Street, when she isn't there. And heaven wouldn't be heaven without the presence of the Lord Jesus. It's because he is there.