This quote, in its simplicity, is so powerful. It quite eloquently is saying that once you have fallen in love with Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, it is absolutely unthinkable that you would not desire to be changed by Him. But it goes even further than that; it describes a specific kind of love, Biblical love.
This is not the kind of love that an unsaved person can give, or even most Christians give, it is a sacrificial love. It is the love Christ had for us when He died on the cross, and the love God had for us when he elected us and sent His Son to die for us. It is the love God has for His people, the church. God the Father had to “sacrifice” His Son to save us, out of love for us. It involves sacrificing. So, if the Biblical sense of the word love means to sacrifice, then what does it mean to “fall in love with the Redeemer in the Biblical sense”? It means we give something up; we sacrifice something when we fall in love with Jesus. But what do we give up? Jesus taught that anyone who wants to find his life will lose it, but those who die to themselves will indeed find it. We must sacrifice everything we were before Christ saved us, in order to love Him the way He loves us.
It then says we should long to be “conformed to the object of that affection”, that object is Christ. We are constantly being sanctified by God in order to one day be like Christ, glorified in heaven. Romans 8:29 says that we have been “predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (Jesus)”. So, we must daily continue to conform to the image of Christ, for that is what we have been saved for. When we fall in love with Christ, we should desire nothing more than to be conformed to the image of Christ, due to the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.
