Is it not a sad thing that after all Christ's love to us, we should repay it with lukewarm love to Him?
Interpretation
The quote reflects the sorrow of responding to unconditional love with indifference or lack of fervor.
Charles Spurgeon laments the tendency of people to offer only a tepid response to the immense love shown to them by Christ. This lukewarm love contrasts sharply with the passionate and unconditional nature of Christ's love, highlighting a disconnection in the human heart and a challenge to reflect on how one genuinely reciprocates love.
In practice
A pastor might use this quote in a sermon about the importance of loving God wholeheartedly.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
How can anyone be against love?
You have been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You must dive naked under and deeper under, a thousand times deeper. Love flows down. The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that? Do not put blankets over the drum. Open completely.
Nothing can be accomplished without love.
But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may.
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