TO LOVE JESUS... by E. M. Bounds

Edward McKendree Bounds (1835-1913), Methodist minister and devotional writer, was born in Shelby County, Missouri. He studied law and was admitted to the bar at 21 years of age. After practicing law for three years, he began preaching for the Methodist Episcopal Church. After the Civil War, Bounds served as pastor of churches in Tennessee and Alabama, and in St. Louis, Missouri. He spent the last 17 years of his life with his family in Washington, Georgia, writing his Spiritual Life Books.
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To love Jesus is to long to be with Him. To love Jesus is to think about Him. To love Jesus is to obey Him, to obey Him readily and implicitly, not feebly and reluctantly.

The certainty of heaven is assured when we keep Jesus in the center of our hearts, in the center of our lives. He is to be the author of impulse and desire, of effort and action. "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus."

Will you get to heaven? What is Jesus to you? Does He charm you? Does He draw you heavenward? Is it to be with Him that you seek heaven? Is He the fairest flower in all its garden? Is He the rarest and most precious of all its jewels? Is He sweeter than all its songs? Does He beget the longings for its blissful abodes? Does the desire to see and be with Him stir the profoundest ambition of your soul?

Jesus and heaven are bound up together. To love Him with an untold passionate devotion is heaven begun, heaven continued, and heaven ended. Paul says: "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me that day: and not to me only, but unto all them that love his appearing." The crown is not only personal to him, but universal, only limited "unto all them that love his appearing."

Here it is not simply love for Jesus personally, but love for the great fact which is to culminate in the great glory of Jesus. To "love his appearing" there is the absolute necessity for loving His Person. The loving His coming is the test of loving His Person. We love the fact because we love the Person. We are not charged to love any theory or opinion about the manner of His coming, or the time, but the fact.

Let Him come when He will, how He will, and for what purpose He will. We love his coming because we love Him. "Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus," and bring Thy heaven with Thee.