DEPRAVED EMOTION

DEPRAVED EMOTION

"If ye love them that love you, what reward have you? Do not even the publicans the same?" Matt 5:46

It is equally true that man is unlike God in his EMOTIONAL NATURE. The action of man's affection at highest, apart from fellowship with God is selfish. Traced back to the final fact, human love is self-centered in its choice of an object, and in its expression of itself towards that object. Said Jesus to His disciples, "If ye love them that love you, what reward have you? Do not even the publicans the same?" (Matt 5:46). In that question there is revealed the very inwardness of depraved human emotion. Man loves such as love him. That fact alone is sufficient to demonstrate man's unlikeness to God. God loves in the very necessity of His Being, and in such way as forever to make impossible the thought of selfishness as a motive. The deepest emotion of man acts finally along the line that will tend to the gratification of desires that are purely selfish. Invariably and inevitably when the capacity for love operates from this center of self, love itself becomes selfish, self-centered, self-inspired, self-considering, and thus destroys itself. God's love is spiritual and sacrificing, and is set upon objects utterly unworthy of love, upon such as have given no reason for love, in that they have hated Him. The love of God is self-emptying, self-sacrificing. Not first for self-enrichment does He bestow gifts (Eph. 4:8), but for the enrichment of those upon whom He bestows them and that happened after He had died in their place. The highest culture of the emotional nature of man, apart from the moving love of God, is debased, in that it is self-centered; and thus in the fact of his emotional nature also, man is unlike God.