Back to the Gospel translates the book A Divine Tonic by puritan Thomas Watson. See chapters already translated:
Another fruit of love is the crucifixion. He who loves God has died for the world. “Is the world crucified for me and I for the world? (Galatians 6. 14). I died for your honors and your pleasures. He who loves God does not feel so much love for anything else. The love of God and the passion of the world are incompatible. “If someone loves the world, isn’t the love of the Father there?” (1Jo 2. 15). The love of God devours all other loves, just as the rod of Moses swallowed the rod of the Egyptians. If a man could live in the Sun, the whole Earth would not pass him from a small point in the sky; so too, when the heart of a man rises above the world in admiration and love for God, how the things below become poor and insignificant! They don’t seem like anything to you. The early Christians demonstrated that they loved God in the sense that his properties did not occupy a prominent place in their hearts; on the contrary, “did those who owned land or houses sell them, bring the corresponding values and put them at the feet of the apostles?” (At 4. 35).
- Test your love for God through this.
- What should we think of those who live as if they never have enough of the world?They have the “hydropisia of greed” 1.
- Greedily pursuing wealth: Sighing for the dust of the earth?(Enm 2.
- 7).
- Never speak of your love for Christ.
- Ignatius said.
- When you prefer the world to the Pearl of great value; And isn’t it true that there are many like that.
- Who value their gold above God?If they have fertile soil.
- They don’t bother looking for the water of life.
- They will sell it to Christ and good conscience for money.
- Will God ever grant heaven to those who so humbly despise Him.
- Preferring sparkling dust to glorious divinity?How can we put our hearts on earth?Only the devil makes us look at him with a magnifying glass.
- The world has no real and intrinsic value; it’s all makeup and deceit.
The next fruit of love is fear. In pious men, love and fear embrace each other. There is a double fear that arises from love.
(i) Fear of disgust. The woman loves her husband and therefore chooses to deny herself rather than dislike him. The more we love God, the more afraid we are to mourn His Spirit. “How, then, could I commit such evil and sin against God?”(Gen. . 39,9). When the Empress, Eud-xia2, threatened to punish Chrysostome with the punishment of exile, he replied, “Tell her that I fear only sin. “It is a blessed love that puts in the Christian the warmth of zeal and the cold of fear. , making him tremble and agitate, without willingly daring to offend God.
(ii) A fear mixed with jealousy. ” Eli was sitting in a chair on the side of the road, waiting to wait, because his heart trembled for God’s ark?(1Sm 4. 13). It is not said that his heart trembled for Hofni and Finenes, their two sons, but their hearts trembled through the ark, because if the ark was taken, then the glory would disappear. He who loves God fears that something will go wrong in the Church. He fears this desecration (which is the scourge of leprosy) will increase, that papism will take hold, that God will turn away from his people; God’s presence in his ordinances is the beauty and strength of a nation; as long as God’s presence is with a people, that people are safe, but the soul inflamed by God’s love fears that the visible emblems of God’s presence will be removed.
With this, let us test our love for God. Many fear running out of peace or business, but they are not afraid of losing God and His gospel. Are they god-loving? Whoever loves God is more afraid of losing spiritual blessings than temporal blessings, if the sun of righteousness disappears from our horizon, what will we have but darkness?
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1 Dropsia is an abnormal buildup of serous fluid in tissues. Watson uses this word, taken from medicine, as a metaphor for those who, out of greed, over-accumulate the things of this world.
2 Aélia Eud’xia was the wife of the Roman emperor of the East, Arcadius, and was a Roman empress at the end of the 4th century. She and Jean Chrysostom had several conflicts, to the point that he compared her to Herodiade, the adulterous woman. who asked Herod for the head of John the Baptist. These conflicts in fact resulted in the dismissal and banishment of Chrysostome on two occasions.
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