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Today's Devotional

You love him even though you have never seen him —1 Peter 1:8 (New Living Translation).

If we really love Christ, we cannot but be conscious of our affection for him. Yet on a point where self-deception is at once so easy and so perilous, consciousness ought not to be relied on, apart from evidence. It requires a faculty of subtle analysis, greatly more astute than most of us possess, to enable us to determine whether our love be genuine or only counterfeit. And happily there are other quarters to which we may repair for evidence. Love to Christ, wherever it exists, has signs following it, to certify its presence. It is not a mere glow of feeling, which warms the heart for a moment, and then vanishes, leaving no trace behind. It is an affection, a settled mood of mind, an active sentiment, which cannot but tell on the temper and the life. Where it is present, it must make its presence felt, it must fill the house with its odor. We may know whether we love the unseen Savior, by the general tenor of our thoughts; that which is uppermost in our thoughts; and hence if Christ is really the object of our love, he must be the subject of our frequent and spontaneous musings. It cannot be that we love him, if we think of him only when his name is mentioned, or his redemption offices obtruded on our attention. What would you say of the mother who seldom or never sent her thoughts after her sailor boy on his distant voyage? What would you say of the plighted maiden who never, save when his name was mentioned, had a thought to bestow on her absent lover? Would you admit the love of either to be more than a name? And why then suppose that a Savior who is seldom or never in our thoughts, can have his rightful place in our affections?

About the author and the source

Isabel Charlotte Garbett compiled a devotional of excerpts from Christian writers. One whom she included was today’s author, J. M. M’Culloch, senior minister of the West Parish, Greenock, who was associated with minister and hymnwriter Horatius Bonar and wrote an often-anthologized sermon “Love to Christ.”