The love of God, writes Charles Hodge, “does not descend upon us as dew drops, but as a stream which spreads itself abroad through the whole soul, filling it with the consciousness of his presence and favour.” God wants your heart to be inundated by wave after wave of His Fatherly affection, so effusively poured out that you feel compelled to request that He pull back lest you drown is His passion! Paul is not talking “of faint and fitful impressions,” says Packer, “but of deep and overwhelming ones.”
The famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837-99) knew precisely what Paul meant. Moody was always reluctant to speak of what occurred, but conceded to give the following brief account:
“. . . one day, in the city of New York — oh, what a day! — I can’t describe it, I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred an experience to name . . . . I can only say that God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different; I did not present any new truths, and yet hundreds were converted. I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you should give me all the world — it would be small dust in the balance.”
Sam Storms