Christ's Love for His Own

"And he that loves Me... I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." - John 14:21

"Christ manifests Himself most sweetly unto them who love Him, especially after long absences. When the soul has been seeking and cannot find Him, wandering in the wilderness under amazing fears, perplexing doubts, doleful despondencies, sinking in heart-overwhelming grief, after a black night of deep desertion... Oh, how comfortable are the bright beams of the morning light when He shines upon their dark, despised and sorrowful spirits, giving them to know assuredly that they are the dearly beloved of His soul, that He has not forgotten them, that He will not forsake them, and that He has a more tender love unto them!...

He manifests Himself when they have the most need... when they are most low in their spirits, most poor and mean in their own esteem as well as most low in their condition through affliction and trouble. Humililty and patience under affliction makes way for the experience of Christ's manifestation. Christ, many times, reserves His cordials for the fainting fits, and the sweetest consolations in the discoveries of His love, for the time of the greatest adversity, especially when the trouble is for His sake."


- Thomas Vincent (1634-1678), an English puritan who was ejected from his pulpit in 1662, and remained in London to minister to the 68,000, and seven of his own household, that would die around him in the plague of 1665.