Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2256
“O Daniel, a man greatly beloved.” Daniel 10:11.
IT did not do Daniel any harm to know that he was greatly beloved of God, or else he would not have received that information from Heaven. Some people are always afraid that if Christian people obtain full assurance and receive a sweet sense of Divine love, they will grow proud, and be carried away with conceit. Do not have any such fear for other people and especially do not be afraid of it for yourselves! I know of no greater blessing that can happen to any man and woman here than to be assured by the Spirit of God that they are greatly beloved of the Lord. Such knowledge might do some of us, who are Christians, the greatest conceivable good! Daniel was not injured by knowing that he was greatly beloved. It has often been said that Daniel is the John of the Old Testament and John is the Daniel of the New Testament. Those two men, Daniel and John, were choice saints. They rose to the greatest height of spiritual obedience and then to the greatest height of spiritual enjoyment.
The knowledge that we are greatly beloved of God, instead of doing us harm, will be a means of blessings in many ways. If you know, my dear Brothers and Sisters, for sure, that you are greatly beloved of God, you will become very humble. You will say, “How could God ever love me?—
‘What was there in me to merit esteem, Or give the Creator delight?’”
I think a sense of God’s love is even more humbling than a sense of our own sin! When the two are blended, they sink the soul very low, not in depression of spirit, but in its estimate of itself.
A sense of God’s love will also excite in you great gratitude. “Oh,” you will say, “how can I repay the Lord for such an amazing favor?” You will be conscious that you can never repay Him, but you will begin working out all sorts of schemes and plans to try to show how much you value the love of God. You will bring out your alabaster box from its hiding place—you will willingly enough break it and pour the precious ointment upon the dear head of Him who has loved you so greatly. I am sure that a certainty of having the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit is one of the greatest promoters of holy gratitude—and holy gratitude is the mother of obedience. When we feel how much we owe, then we seek to know the will of God and take a delight in doing it. Whatever He says to us, we are glad to do as a proof that we really are grateful for “love so amazing, so Divine.”
This will also consecrate us. I believe that to know certainly that you are greatly beloved of God will make you feel that you cannot live as others do. You cannot trifle with sin. He who lives in the heart of the King must be faithful to Him. If called to stand in God’s immediate Presence as a courtier and a favorite, you must take care how you behave yourself and you will do so. “You are not your own; for you are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” In proportion as we are sure of His love, our love to Him will burn like coals of juniper which have a most vehement heat—and everything contrary to the will of God will be consumed in that blessed flame.
A sense of Divine love will also strengthen us. What is there that a man cannot do when he is in love, even, with one of his own race? But when he gets to be in love with God and knows of a certainty that he is greatly beloved of God—he would cut his way through a lane of devils—he would face an army of angels and defeat them all—for love is a conquering Grace. When faith is side by side with love, it—
“Laughs at impossibilities, And says, ‘It shall be done,’” and love goes and does it, for there is nothing which the love of God will not enable us to do.
Moreover, this assurance of God’s love will make us very courageous. If you are a man greatly beloved and you know it, you will be a brave man! Let me never come into collision with the sword of that man whom God greatly loves—he will cut me in halves! The love of God makes a hero of the man on whom it is fixed. He is in the thick of the fray. He defies sin, death and Hell. He will burn for Christ—he would be ready to burn a thousand times when once he was assured that he was the object of the peculiar love of God and, like Daniel, could be addressed as “a man greatly beloved.”
This will make a man glad. If we are greatly beloved of God, how can we be miserable and discontent? Oh, no! If you are a man greatly beloved, you will trip with light feet over the hills of sorrow. You will be glad in the Lord, even when you have much to depress and discourage you. You will begin the music of Heaven even here, for a sense of God’s love in the soul sets all the bells of the heart ringing. He is the most glad man who has the greatest assurance that he is “a man greatly beloved.”