I have said this thing is eternal.  Did you ever notice how continually John associates love and faith with eternal life?  I was not told when I was a boy that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should have everlasting life.”  What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have safety.  But I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him—­that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to love—­hath everlasting life.  The gospel offers a man life.  Never offer men a thimbleful of gospel.  Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world.  Then only can the gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit, and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward.  Many of the current gospels are addrest only to a part of man’s nature.  They offer peace, not life; faith, not love; justification, not regeneration.  And men slip back again from such religion because it has never really held them.  Their nature was not all in it.  It offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was lived before.  Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of the world.

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.  Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.  We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow.  Why do we want to live tomorrow?  It is because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back.  There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved.  It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide.  So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live; because to live is to love.  Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no contact with life, no reason to live.  He dies by his own hand.  Eternal life is to know God, and God is love.  This is Christ’s own definition.  Ponder it.  “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”  Love must be eternal.  It is what God is.  On the last analysis, then, love is life.  Love never faileth, and life never faileth, so long as there is love.  That is the philosophy of what Paul is showing us; the reason why in the nature of things love should be the supreme thing—­because it is going to last; because in the nature of things it is an eternal life.  It is a thing that we are living now, not that we get when we die; that we shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living now.  No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old all alone, unloving and unloved.  To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God; for God is love.