God's love,
but God's love is the cause of Christ's death. 'God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son.'

When we hear in the Old Testament, 'I am that I am,' we may apply it to
this great subject. For that declaration of the very inmost essence of
the divine nature is not merely the declaration, in half metaphysical
terms, of a self-substituting, self-determining Being, high above
limitation and time and change, but it is a declaration that when He
loves He loves freely and unmodified save by the constraint of His own
Being. Just as the light, because it is light and must radiate, falls
upon dunghills and diamonds, upon black rocks and white snow, upon
ice-peaks and fertile fields, so the great fountain of the Divine Grace
pours out upon men by reason only of its own continual tendency to
communicate its own fulness and blessedness.

There follows from that the other thought, on which the Apostle mainly
dwells in our context, that the salvation which we need, and may have,
is not won by desert, but is given as a gift. Mark the last words of my
text--'that not of yourselves it is the gift of God.' They have often
been misunderstood, as if they referred to the faith which is mentioned
just before. But that is a plain misconception of the Apostle's meaning,
and is contradicted by the whole context. It is not faith that is the
gift of God, but it is salvation by grace. That is plain if you will
read on to the next verse. 'By grace are ye saved through faith, and
that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man
should boast.' What is it that is 'not of works'? Faith? certainly not.
Nobody would ever have thought it worth while to say, 'faith is _not_ of
works,' because nobody would have said that it _was_. The two clauses
necessarily refer to the same thing, and if the latter of them must
refer to salvation by grace, so must the former. Thus, the Apostle's
meaning is that we get salvation, not because we work for it but because
God gives it as a free gift, for which we have nothing to render, and
which we can never deserve.

Now, I am sure that there are some of you who are saying to yourselves,
'This is that old, threadbare, commonplace preaching again!' Well! shame
on us preachers if we have made a living Gospel into a dead theology.
And shame no less on you hearers if by you the words that should be good
news that would make the tongue of the dumb sing, and the lame man leap
as a