Messages of Blessing
"The fulness of the blessing of Christ" (Romans 15:29 New Trans.)
Ye desolate children of sorrow ! As fleet as the bloom of May,
Your dreams of a brighter morrow, Your hopes have they passed away ?
The chill breath of time, does it wither The boughs where ye build your nest ?
Ah, come then, ye mourners, come hither, I'll tell you of endless rest.
I'll tell you of Him who hath spoken Sweet peace to my weary heart,
And healed it, though withered and broken, With love's all-availing art.
It was He, 'twas the Lord of glory, Who died on the cursed tree,
On Calvary, stricken and gory, A suffering Lamb for me.
Sir E. Denny
(pp. 173-176, Footprints for Pilgrims)
Being alone with Jesus is the sinner's first position, it is the beginning of his joy, and no one has a right to meddle with it ... Sin casts us upon God alone ... We must not surrender to any the right of God to talk with us alone about our sins.
"And they remembered His words." (Luke 24:8) How much mischief do we get into by not remembering God's words ! When the Lord Jesus was tempted He had the word of God at hand, and by that simple word He could claim the victory in the battle.
"Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." ... How entirely has Christendom refused to learn this lesson of "the little child" ! She has consented to forget that it was a poor despised Galilean, a carpenter's Son, that suffered the death of the cross ... He did not go to Calvary from kings' courts, or amid the acclamations of the world; but He was the rejected One ... "a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people." ... Christendom ... may boast of Calvary and of the Lamb of God in a certain way, but it has entirely lost sight of Nazareth and of the carpenter's Son. It links the palace with the cross, greatness in the world, wealth and ease with the confession of Jesus and of the gospel.
Nothing perhaps has been a more common source of ... falling out by the way than the holding of favourite religious opinions, or the undue, disproportioned estimations of certain doctrines or points of truth.
If we were only happy in Him, we should work much better for Him. It is joy in Christ that gains victory over the world. Why are we in subjection to the world ? Just because we have not found in Christ all the joy we ought to find.
He was a divine visitor to this world, a heavenly stranger among men ... He had not where to lay His head while He was visiting their necessities with all the resources of God. This is the ideal of a saint of God -- to be independent of all this world can give, while with open heart and lavish hand bestowing upon it all the benefits and blessings of God.
It is one thing to be the advocate of Christianity, and another to be the disciple of it. And though it may sound strange at first, far easier is it to teach its lessons than to learn them.
Worldliness and selfishness have no power to breathe the atmosphere of the kingdom of God.
Are our hearts upon such enjoyments as God can sanction and Jesus share with us ?
We need not so much to covet information about Him as power to use divinely what we know.
--- J.G.B.
