‘I
love the Lord... I will call on Him as long as I live’(Psalm 116:1-2).
Our love for God is to be a lifelong life. It is to be the love of our
life. What are we to do when our love for God grows weak? We must
remember His love for us - ‘Great is His love towards us. The
faithfulness of the Lord endures forever’(Psalm 117:2). When we find it
difficult to keep on loving God, we must remember how much He loves us.
When we feel like giving up on loving God, we must remember that He
never gives up on loving us. He loves us when our love for Him is
strong. He loves us when our love for Him is weak. In love, He reaches
out to us. He brings us out of our weakness and into His strength. Let
His strong love reach you in your weakness and give you His strength:
‘Loving Him who first loved me’(Church Hymnary, 450).
A response to a comment by G. R. Osborne on Berkouwer’s understanding of the doctrine of final perseverance
In his contribution to Clark Pinnock (editor), Grace Unlimited (1975), G. R. Osborne states that Berkouwer, in Faith and Perseverance, pp. 9-10, “speaks of the time less ness of the doctrine of final perseverance, founded on ‘the richness and abidingness of salvation” (p. 188, emphasis mine). This single-sentence comment on Berkouwer’s view hardly gives a fair indication of the type of thinking found in Chapter 1 of Berkouwer’s Faith and Perseverance - “Time li ness and Relevance” (pp. 9-14, emphasis mine). Berkouwer insists that “the living preaching of the Scriptures, which offer no metaphysical and theoretical views about … ‘permanency’ as an independent theme in itself, does nothing to encourage ‘a continuity which is … opposed in any way to the living nature of faith” (p. 13). Berkouwer stresses that “The perseverance of the saints is not primarily a theoretical problem but a confession of faith” (p. 14) and that “The perseverance of the saints is unbreakably connected wi...
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