One of the deadliest thoughts which can infect a human spirit is this I am of no use, no worth, to earth or to heaven. And yet it is a natural thought, the natural utterance of our selfish, sensual lives. Who has not groaned out the confession of Asaph: "I was as a beast before Thee"? Man is profoundly conscious at once of sinfulness and impotence. The worst sin against heaven is despair. The idea the Lord hath need of thee is a very fundamental principle of the Gospel, the good news from God to man.
I. Is there not something radically false in this connection of need or want with the Divine name? The writers of the Scripture see this difficulty plainly. They are full of sublime statements of the awfulness of the Divine supremacy. God absolute and infinite; the creature dependent and limited. But, on the other hand, they present and reiterate ideas as to the relation of the creature to the Creator, as to God's need of man in a very solemn sense, and man's need of God in every sense, which we are unable to square with any definition of the Divine attributes in which the intellect can find no flaw.
II. It is through Christ and Christ alone that we attain to the knowledge of the name and the mind of God. His love is essentially redeeming. It is a love which seeks and seeks to save. And this love which redeems has a great sorrow and want in the heart of it. It misses something which is infinitely dear to it, and it prepares to endure infinite toils and pains to recover that and to bring it home. The whole expression of the Incarnate One is a seeking, a longing, a loving.
III. It is impossible that God can seek us with more intense earnestness of purpose, or in more effectual modes, than those which are embodied in the mission of Christ to recover us to Himself. We may say reverently that the Father hath exhausted all the riches of His love in the gift of Christ to the world.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 62.
References: Isaiah 62:12. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 525; Ibid., Evening by Evening,p. 71.