Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:722 (Apr 2024)
Article: A Love Story Infinitely True
Author: Lewis Sperry Chafer

BSac 181:722 (April-June 2024) p. 150

A Love Story Infinitely True

Lewis Sperry Chafer

Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871–1952) was the founder and first president of Dallas Theological Seminary. He served as editor of Bibliotheca Sacra from 1940 to 1952. This article, first published in 1948, received minor revisions to style and format for this reprint. See Lewis Sperry Chafer, “A Love Story Infinitely True,” BSac 105.418 (1948): 134–44.

Ιs it possible that I am addressing some person who feels that everything in life has been superficial and therefore unsatisfactory? Do you at times sense the depths of your own being and long to enter into its fathomless realities? Have you met with some person who baffled you because that one seemed to live in a world of true experience into which you are conscious you have never entered? Has it occurred to you that these and greater compensations would be your portion in life if you were brought into a living, vital, and unchangeable relation to God?

To this end, I am asking you to forget your present ideas of so-called religion, to forget prejudice, to forget arguments that unbelief may suggest, even to give no thought for the present as to your manner of daily life whether it might be or might not be well-pleasing to God. For once I ask you to dismiss the whole problem as to what one should or should not do. All these issues which are quite important in their place are unrelated in any direct way to the fundamental reality which must be considered first if any worthwhile advance step is to be taken.

Perhaps the subject may be best approached by asking and answering three vital questions.

Why Will God Do Things For You?

It is evident that whatever is done in the changing of our lives must be done by God Himself, and it is reasonable to seek the answer to the direct question as to why God may be expected to do

BSac 181:722 (April-June 2024) p. 151

transforming things for us. This question comes first because in every respect it stands first. The next questions in order would concern what God has done and what He will do; but these, though of immeasurable import, will not be comprehended unless we get back to the reason why God acts. The fact of His motive is paramount. Fortunately for us, He has not left us with uncertainties at this point.

The answer is fully stated in four words—Because He loves you. As a truth, this is both stupendous and basic. It is direct information which if believed and acted upon engenders a wonderful consciousness of this great characteristic of God. To be told, as we are told repeatedly, that God loves us with an infinite, unchanging love, brings to the heart of the one who heeds the messa...