Richard Weaver - St George's West Church (1860)
A correspondent thus describes a service conducted by Weaver in Free St. George's, Edinburgh: His prayer was one of those appeals of felt infirmity, which draws every believing heart along with it close up to the footstool of the King, and makes you feel that it is impossible the blessing should not come. His text was, " God so loved the world," etc. He showed us that all apprehensions or discoveries of the measure of God's love made as yet, in confessions, stand¬ards, or individual believers' experiences, were true and real approaches to the knowledge of it; but left its mainsprings, depths, and boundaries, extending far beyond the limits of our knowledge. He closed with this original illustration: When a boy, I one day went bathing with another boy who was playing truant from school. He had some chalk in his pocket, and after our bath he proposed that we should climb to the top of the Shropshire hill, at the foot of which flowed the stream in which we had bathed. With his chalk he was to write our names on the blue heavens that seemed to us to rest on that hill-top. We reached the summit to meet with a great astonish¬ment. The blue sky was as far above us as ever. Have you a mind to find out how far God's love to ruined man can stretch? Do you think you can write its limits down? Just try and climb one height that you suppose to measure it, and up there on the blue heavens of his compassions write how much God loves the world. You'll find the task impossible. You'll be compelled to give up the attempt, and fall back on this: " God so loved the world, that He gave his only-begotten Son." When you can tell the full glory of that gift, then, and only then, will you be able to fathom the depths of that " so."