A Heavenly Treatise on the Divine Love of Christ

Book excerpt: John Preston D.D. (1587–1628) was a Reformed, English puritan minister, and master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It is clear that his heart was firmly set on the propagation of the Calvinistic theology; his posthumous works (edited by Richard Sibbes, John Davenport, Thomas Ball, and partly by Thomas Goodwin, D.D.) are a storehouse of such sentiments. How much do you love Jesus Christ? Is your love true or manufactured? Such questions rub Christians the wrong way since it calls into question whether or not one has true love to the Savior Jesus Christ. Preston not only questions how one loves Christ, but shows both how one might love Christ sincerely, as well as the accursed state of those who do not love the Lord Jesus at all, or in a hypocritical manner. His text is 1 Cor. 16:22 “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema, maranatha." He shows how to love Christ, reasons to love Christ, who Christ is as the one we ought to love, and consequences for not loving him as we should; both as a Christian, and as the result of not being converted. This is not a scan or facsimile, has been updated in modern English for easy reading and has an active table of contents for electronic versions.