How Does God Love Us? — Spurgeon on the Steadfast Love
⏱ 14 min read
You have heard, all your life, that God loves you. The phrase has been on the bumper sticker, the children’s-ministry colouring page, the sympathy card from the woman at church. You believe it, mostly. You also — quietly, in the parts of you that do not say things out loud — wonder how. Not whether. How. What kind of love is it, exactly. Whether it is the kind of love that changes with your behaviour. Whether it is the kind of love that runs low when the week is bad. Whether it is the kind of love that has a temperature, and whether the temperature drops when you do. The phrase has been said to you so often that it has gone shapeless. You do not know what kind of love is being affirmed.
This is the slow answer. Not the bumper sticker. The actual answer Charles Spurgeon gave, scattered through Morning and Evening — the devotional he wrote for his London congregation in 1865 and 1868, one short reading for the morning and one for the evening, all year long — read at the speed Spurgeon wrote it, with three passages held next to each other, because the question how does God love us was the question Spurgeon spent his life answering from twelve thousand pulpits and as many quiet pages. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. The question how does God love us will not be answered by a sentence. It will be answered by sitting next to three sentences until the kind of love they describe becomes recognisable.
Charles Spurgeon wrote Morning and Evening during the busiest years of his pastorate at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London — a congregation of six thousand, an orphanage of two hundred children, a pastors’ college of one hundred students, a magazine, a hospital, a string of mission stations, and a steady fortnightly publishing schedule of his sermons. He was thirty-one when he started. He wrote the devotional so that the people in his pews, who could not all sit under his preaching at every moment of the week, would have something short and steady to read in the morning and the evening — something that named the kind of love God has for the believing soul, in the kind of plain language that does not require a degree to receive. The devotional became, for the English-speaking church, one of the longest-lasting answers ever written to the question you are asking now.
The first passage: the perfect peace
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The sentence is doing more than it first appears. Spurgeon is naming an experience — meditating on God’s mercy and love, suddenly the heart filled with perfect peace — and he is naming it the way a botanist might note that he had been sitting near a particular plant when the air became fragrant. The peace, in Spurgeon’s account, did not arrive because he produced it. It arrived because he was sitting near the right thing. The thing was God’s mercy and love. The peace was the natural fragrance of proximity to it.
This is the first thing the question how does God love us needs to know. The love of God is not a love that demands you generate the response. It is a love whose own presence, when you sit near it, produces the response. The peace is not the work. The sitting is the work. The peace comes from what you have been sitting next to. This means that the modern Christian woman who has been blaming herself for not feeling God’s love more often — for not having more of the delightful sense of perfect peace Spurgeon describes — has, probably, been trying to manufacture the fragrance rather than sit near the flower. The fragrance is His to give. Your part is the sitting.
Notice also the word suddenly. Spurgeon does not say after an hour of intense effort. He says suddenly — the peace arrived in its own time, not on a schedule he could control. The love of God is not, on Spurgeon’s account, the kind of love that arrives by appointment. It arrives in the middle of the slow practice, often when you are not particularly looking for it, and the suddenly is part of how you know it is His and not yours. If the love you have been receiving has been on a clock you could set, the chances are it was your own.
For the modern Christian woman whose interior life has been mostly performance — who has been trying to produce the feeling of being loved by God by harder reading, more disciplined prayer, more careful obedience — this is the line to keep near the page. Sit near the mercy. The peace will come in its own time. The arriving is His. Your part is the sitting.
(If the journaling itself has been the part you have struggled to begin — if you have wanted a place to do this kind of sitting and not known where to start — how to start a gratitude journal you’ll actually keep walks the smallest practical entry point. And if your year has been the kind of year that has made the question how does God love me harder to ask — Christian journal prompts for women — healing after a hard year is the longer letter to the woman whose year has been heavy.)
The second passage: the celestial breath
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. The second time, read it as a prayer.
This is the passage that names how God loves. Notice the verbs. Walk with me. Condescend to have fellowship. Abide with me forever. Three verbs, three descriptions of the kind of love at work. Walking with is the love of companionship — the love that goes the distance of the day next to you, not above you. Condescend to have fellowship is the love that bends down — Spurgeon’s Victorian English for the love that lowers itself to your level, the love of the King who comes into the kitchen and pulls up a chair. Abide with me forever is the love that does not leave — the love whose tense is permanent, whose departure is impossible, whose presence is built in.
The three verbs do not describe three different loves. They describe three aspects of the one steadfast love — the hesed of the Hebrew Bible, the agape of the New Testament, the love that Spurgeon, in his Victorian way, calls celestial. The companionship aspect — He walks with you. The condescension aspect — He lowers Himself to be available to you. The permanence aspect — He does not leave you. How does God love us — by walking, by condescending, by abiding. The three together are the answer.
Hold the image at the end of the passage. The cool wind is as the breath of celestial love. Spurgeon is sitting outdoors in the evening. The wind on his face has become, in his prayer, the felt sign of God’s love brushing against him. He is naming an experience the modern Christian woman knows in flashes but does not always have words for — the moment in the garden, or the kitchen window, or the drive home, when the air for a second feels kind, the way the breath of someone who loves you feels different from the breath of someone who does not. The Christian tradition has always taken these moments seriously. The wind on the face in the evening is, sometimes, the wind. And sometimes it is the breath of celestial love. Spurgeon would say: you will know which is which by sitting still and letting the moment register, rather than rushing past it.
For the modern Christian woman whose love-life with God has felt thin — who has been wondering whether He actually likes her, on top of loving her in the theological sense — this is the line to keep near the page. The cool wind is as the breath of celestial love. The love is not only the doctrinal proposition that He died for you. It is also the small daily nearness that brushes against you in unguarded moments, that you have been quietly registering for years without naming. Spurgeon would tell you to name it. The love has been closer than you knew.
A pause — for the body
The kind of love Spurgeon is describing lands in the body before it lands in the mind. The body recognises the touch of a love that does not run low before the intellect can articulate why.
Sit somewhere quiet. Set the page down. Notice your chest — the area between the collarbones and the bottom of the ribcage. The modern Christian woman who has been quietly uncertain whether God’s love is the kind of love that can be relied on usually carries the uncertainty as a tightness across the chest, a kind of held breath that never quite finishes its exhale. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the chest soften — not deflate, soften. The shoulders drop with it. Then take a second breath, and on the exhale, let the chest open slightly — as if you were making a little more room for something to be received. Two breaths. Chest soft. Chest open.
That small opening is the body’s way of admitting it has been bracing against being loved. The body has been holding a low-grade defence against the possibility that the love is real, because if the love is real and then runs out, the loss will be more than the body can hold. The defence is understandable. The defence is also the wall against which the steadfast love has been pressing for years. Spurgeon’s word for the love — steadfast — is precisely the word that names what the defence is not necessary against. The love does not run out. The body can stop bracing. The opening is small. The receiving it makes possible is not.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of slow daily opening. One short passage each evening, room to write the honest sentence about what the love has felt like that day, no demand to feel more than you currently feel. The journal is not where you generate the experience of being loved. It is where you slowly let the love that has been steady all along come into focus.
(If self-care has felt, this year, like one more demand on a depleted woman — if even the idea of caring for yourself feels like work — self-care ideas for Christian women in hard seasons is the letter to the depleted. And if you have suspected that the self-love language and the gratitude language might not be the right language for a Christian woman to use — self-love and gratitude — the Christian practice that doesn’t require either word walks the better vocabulary.)
The third passage: come, plant fresh flowers
“Come, therefore, O Lord, my God, my soul invites thee earnestly, and waits for thee eagerly. Come to me, O Jesus, my well-beloved, and plant fresh flowers in my garden, such as I see blooming in such perfection in thy matchless character. Come, O my Father, who art the Husbandman, and deal with me in thy tenderness and prudence. Come, O Holy Spirit, and bedew my whole nature, as the herbs are now moistened with the evening dews.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
This is the passage where the question how does God love us opens into the active work the love does in a life. Spurgeon prays, in turn, to the Son, the Father, and the Spirit — and asks each of them to do a specific work of love. Come to me, O Jesus… plant fresh flowers in my garden — the love of Christ is the love that grows new things in soil that has been depleted. Come, O my Father, who art the Husbandman, and deal with me in thy tenderness and prudence — the love of the Father is the love of the gardener who knows the plant, knows the season, knows what each year requires. Come, O Holy Spirit, and bedew my whole nature, as the herbs are now moistened with the evening dews — the love of the Spirit is the love that arrives like dew, that softens what had grown dry, that arrives without effort on the leaf’s part.
Three aspects of one love. Three workings of one steadfast care. The garden is the same garden. The gardener is the same gardener. The plant is the same plant. But the love comes in three movements — Christ planting, the Father tending, the Spirit watering — and the question how does God love us is, in part, answered by naming all three. He plants. He tends. He waters. The love is not a flat affirmation. It is an active daily work, performed by the Triune God in your particular garden, with the patience of someone whose timeline is longer than the worst week.
Hold the verb bedew. It is an unusual word. Dew does not arrive by force. Dew arrives quietly, overnight, on leaves that are not aware of being moistened, and by morning the whole garden is wet without anyone having watered it. The love of God arrives, often, this way. You do not feel the watering happening. You wake up — months later, or years later — and find that something is growing that you did not plant, and the only explanation is that the dew has been coming, slowly, while you were sleeping. The love is steady. The arrival is quiet. The growth is unmistakable in retrospect.
For the modern Christian woman whose garden has felt dry — who has been wondering whether the love of God is still doing anything in a life that feels mostly static — this is the line to keep near the page. Bedew my whole nature. The love is still arriving. The dew comes overnight. The morning will reveal what has been watered.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what is the Trinity — Augustine’s slow answer and what are the attributes of God — Tozer’s plain theology. Each takes a single classical question and walks it slowly through one father.)
What the slow answer actually leaves you with
So — how does God love us. The bumper-sticker answer is true: God loves you. Hold the bumper-sticker answer. Spurgeon would. But hold it inside the lived answer, which is the one Morning and Evening and Till He Come are both reaching for: God loves you by walking with you, by condescending to have fellowship with you, by abiding with you forever — by planting, tending, and watering a garden He has been the gardener of since before you were born — and the love is steadfast in the precise sense that the Hebrew word means: it does not run out, it does not waver, it is not earned by the season’s harvest and is not lost when the harvest fails.
The love, read this way, stops being the affirmation you keep needing to be reminded of. It becomes the description of the kind of care that has been around your life for as long as you have been alive. The walking — He has been with you on the bad days. The condescending — He has been low enough to be near you in the kitchen, the school run, the difficult phone call. The abiding — He has not, at any point in any year of any decade, left. The planting, tending, watering — there are things growing in your life right now that you cannot explain, and the explanation is the gardener you have not always been thanking.
What slowly answering the question how does God love us does, over a year, is move the answer from your head to your chest. You stop needing the bumper sticker. You start praying, with Spurgeon, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth — and you find, on the evening you say it slowly, with the cool wind on your face, that the love has rearranged itself from a proposition into a presence. You are no longer trying to believe the love. You are letting it be, toward you, the steady thing it has always been, and the believing quietly stops being the task.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the steadfast love in proximity to a soul that has stopped trying to manufacture the feeling of being loved and started letting itself be loved by the One who has been doing it all along.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — perfect peace, the breath of celestial love, bedew my whole nature — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question about God’s love is, at last, ready to be answered by the love it has always been asking about.
