The Love of Jesus—What it is—None But His Loved Ones Know

Spurgeon builds the sermon as a ladder of six ascending stages by which believers grow in knowing Christ's love — beginning at the lowest rung of doctrinal knowledge (valuable but merely a threshold, not to be mistaken for the thing itself), rising to grateful, experiential knowledge (remembering the day of conversion and seeing every subsequent mercy as a fresh letter from Christ), then to practical knowledge (which comes only from obeying Christ's commands in the back streets and lodging houses, not from sitting in pews), then to contemplative knowledge (fixing the eyes of faith steadily on Christ's person, wounds, and love until the soul is flooded with a joy that makes even Puritan Flavel forget his supper and sit awake all night in a happiness greater than sleep), then to sympathetic knowledge (weeping over sinners as Christ wept over Jerusalem, longing to spend and be spent for souls as Paul could wish himself accursed for his brethren), and finally to absorptive knowledge — the highest rung — where the "I" is swallowed up in Christ so completely that it is no longer self that thinks and feels but Christ living in us. He threads through these stages two important warnings: first, that doctrinal knowledge must never become a dead end or be used as a sealed tomb for a living Christ; and second, that contemplative sweetness must never be used as an excuse for idleness, illustrated by the monk who heard the convent bell while in his vision and was told by Christ that if he had stayed, the vision would have fled, but because he went to serve the poor, Christ had waited. He closes by turning to unconverted hearers with the simplest possible gospel: not "go home and try to feel something" but simply "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ" — trust him, fall at the foot of the cross exactly as you are, and discover that salvation is not a process but an instant, complete exchange, your sin taken and Christ's righteousness given, the whole work already finished before you arrived.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on June 7, 1863.