Love that passeth knowledge
Love that Passeth Knowledge
Moody opens his best known book with a simple diagnosis: people do not stay away from God because they do not care, but because they are convinced God hates them, and the whole chapter is a barrage of stories against that conviction.
“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
This passage also appears in bible verses about god's love.
- Passage
- Ephesians 3:19
- Preached
- Published 1884
- Place
- Chicago
- Reference
- Chapter 1 of The Way to God
It is the first chapter of The Way to God, and Moody puts it first on purpose: before talking about repentance or faith, he reckons the idea blocking everything else has to come down. Convince a man that you love him, he says, and you have won his heart.
His method here is not argument but accumulation: one story after another in which a love goes out looking for someone who believes himself impossible to love. Moody preached to crowds who knew the theory; he told them stories because the theory was not reaching them.
A love that goes first
The chapter's thesis is the order of events: God does not wait for a person to improve before loving him. He loved us before we loved him, and he loves even his enemies, which is what the cross demonstrates.
Moody pins it with the case of Charlie Ross, the kidnapped boy his whole audience knew. If his mother found him filthy and ragged at a public meeting, would she wait for him to be washed before embracing him? So with God: he loves us and washes us, not washes us and then loves us.
The portrait and the gas-lit sign
The sign story happened in his own Chicago church: a broken man wandered in and stood staring at the words God is Love lit above the pulpit. His first reaction is the reflex Moody wants to expose: not me, I am a miserable sinner. He came back, wept, and finally understood that the sign carried no conditions.
The portrait story is from Scotland: a mother hung her own photograph on the walls of a midnight mission in Glasgow, where the women of the street ended up. Her daughter, lost for years, recognised the face and understood at once that her mother had not erased her. She went home that same week.
Loving is not approving
Moody guards against the obvious confusion and cuts it with a line that stuck: God loves the sinner, but he hates the sin. The love in this chapter is not indulgence; it is the reason coming back is worth it.
He closes with the dying soldier at Murfreesboro, certain there was no salvation left for him. Moody did not argue: he read him John 3:14-15 three times, and the man died hours later resting on those two verses. It is the whole chapter in miniature: against the certainty of being past cure, not an argument but a text.
In his own words
“If you can convince a man that you love him you have won his heart.”
“God loves the sinner; but He hates the sin.”
This is our summary. The full sermon by D. L. Moody is available at Project Gutenberg. It is in the public domain: you can read all of it for free.
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