{"id":3534,"date":"2015-12-19T04:09:03","date_gmt":"2015-12-19T04:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=3534"},"modified":"2015-12-19T04:09:03","modified_gmt":"2015-12-19T04:09:03","slug":"everlasting-love-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=3534","title":{"rendered":"EVERLASTING LOVE"},"content":{"rendered":"

EVERLASTING LOVE<\/strong>
\n\u201cI have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn\u00a0 you!\u201dJeremiah 31:3<\/a>
\nBeliever! are you tempted now to doubt His love? Are His footsteps lost amid the night shadows through which He is now conducting you? Remember He had His eye upon you before the birth of time; yes, from all eternity! What appears to you now some sudden capricious exercise of His power or sovereignty, is determination and decree of \u201ceverlasting love.\u201d \u201cI have loved you,\u201d He seems to say, \u201csuffering one, into this affliction; I will love you through it; and when My designs regarding you are complete, I will show you that the love which is \u2018from everlasting is, to everlasting!\u2019\u201d
\nChild of God if there is a ripple now agitating the surface of the stream, trace it up to this fountain-head of love. God is faithful. He cannot deny Himself. If some dark clouds are now intercepting those gracious beams, He must have some wise end to subserve.
\n\u201cFor a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will bring you back. In a moment of anger I turned my face away for a little while. But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,\u201d says the Lord, your Redeemer. \u201cJust as I swore in the time of Noah that I would never again let a flood cover the earth and destroy its life, so now I swear that I will never again pour out my anger on you. For the mountains may depart and the hills disappear, but even then I will remain loyal to you. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,\u201d says the Lord, who has mercy on you.\u00a0Isaiah 54:7-10<\/a>
\nGod sets His rainbow in the dark sky; and as if it were not enough that His people should look upon it and take comfort in its many and varied promises; He himself graciously becomes a party in gazing on the covenant pledge, \u201cAnd the rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I shall look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant!\u201d (Genesis 9:16<\/a>) He puts himself (so to speak) in mind of His own everlasting love! In His saint\u2019s dark and cloudy day, when they imagine that their eyes are alone resting on the tokens of covenant faithfulness, the eye of a covenant keeping God is resting upon them too. \u201cI will look upon my own promises,\u201d He seems to say. \u201cThey shall be memorials to Myself of my purposes of unchanging mercy.\u201d Nor is this love merely a general indiscriminate affection. The verse speaks of each individual member of the Covenant family, \u201cI have loved you!\u201d \u201cO my Father\u201d, says Madam Guyon, \u201cit seems to me sometimes as if You did forget every other being in order to think only of my faithless and ungrateful heart.\u201d
\nLet us seek to view our trials as so many cords of loving-kindness, by which our God is seeking to draw us, yes, and will draw us nearer Himself. Who knows what mercy may be bound up in what may seem to us dark and mysterious dispensations? We are apt to misname and misinterpret His ways. We call His dealings severe trials. He calls them \u201cloving-kindness.\u201d Drooping saint! let your eyes rest on the rainbow over-arching the throne of God, spanning from eternity to eternity; and read for your comfort the gracious declaration, \u201cThe mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon those who fear Him.\u201d John Mac Duff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EVERLASTING LOVE \u201cI have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn\u00a0 you!\u201dJeremiah 31:3 Believer! are you tempted now to doubt His love? Are His footsteps lost amid the night shadows through which He is now conducting you? Remember He had His eye upon you before the birth of time; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,41,115,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-john-macduff","category-the-eternal-covenant","category-eternal-covenant-promise-of-god","category-gods-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3536,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3534\/revisions\/3536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}