I. The highest love is marked by its severity, for the absolute condition of it is that it will never rest till it has lifted up the man whom it reaches to a level with itself. The lower love will often shrink from giving pain, nay will rightly do so unless it knows that the pain will purify, but not so the love of God. His love cannot be content to leave us to be mere creatures of our own appetites and passions, of the whim of the moment, or of the besetting sin which has fastened on our souls, or of a mere worldly purpose. There is no such thing as forgiveness without cleansing, and the cleansing is in itself the punishment of the sin which it cleans.
II. Human love must be controlled ever by such love as this. No human love is true which puts the lower above the higher, or drags down what it loves from the path of honour or of duty.
III. Those who have been most touched with a sense of this have not prayed to be spared, but rather the contrary. Anything, everything, is welcome to those men which makes them more and more the true sons of God, which refines them to that purity which they themselves delight in. So, too, do men most deeply feel what is the meaning of the death of Christ. He suffered for us, indeed, but that suffering is all strange to us till we begin to suffer too.
Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons,2nd series, p. 39.
References: Psalms 94:12. E. Garbett, The Soul's Life,p. 144.Psalms 94:16. H. R. Reynolds, Notes of the Christian Life,p. 283; J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons,vol. ii., p. 219. Psalms 94:19. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv., No. 883, and vol. xix., No. 1116. Psalms 94 S. Cox, Expositor,2nd series, vol. vi., p. 273.