Milo

July 9th

The great probing

Ye cannot serve the Lord. Joshua 24:19.

Have you the slightest reliance on any thing other than God? Is there a remnant of reliance left on any natural virtue, any set of circumstances? Are you relying on yourself in any particular in this new proposition which God has put before you? That is what the probing means. It is quite true to say—‘I cannot live a holy life’; but you can decide to let Jesus Christ make you holy. “Ye cannot serve the Lord God”—but you can put yourself in the place where God’s Almighty power will work through you. Are you sufficiently right with God to expect Him to manifest His wonderful life in you?
“Nay, but we will serve the Lord.” It is not an impulse, but a deliberate commitment. You say—‘But God can never have called me to this, I am too unworthy, it can’t mean me.’ It does mean you, and the weaker and feebler you are, the better. The one who has something to trust in is the last one to come anywhere near saying—‘I will serve the Lord.’
We say—‘If I really could believe!’ The point is—If I really will believe. No wonder Jesus Christ lays such emphasis on the sin of unbelief. “And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” If we really believed that God meant what He said—what should we be like! Dare I really let God be to me all that He says He will be?

July 9

“I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.” (Isa. 48:10.)

DOES not the Word come like a soft shower, assuaging the fury of the flame? Yes, is it not an asbestos armor, against which the heat has no power? Let the affliction come—God has chosen me. Poverty, thou mayest stride in at my door; but God is in the house already, and He has chosen me. Sickness, thou mayest intrude; but I have a balsam ready—God has chosen me. Whatever befall me in this vale of tears, I know that He has chosen me.
Fear not, Christian; Jesus is with thee. In all thy fiery trials, His presence is both thy comfort and safety. He will never leave one whom He has chosen for His own. “Fear not, for I am with thee,” is His sure word of promise to His chosen ones in “the furnace of affliction.”—C. H. Spurgeon.

Pain’s furnace heat within me quivers,
  God’s breath upon the flame doth blow;
And all my heart in anguish shivers
  And trembles at the fiery glow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And in the hottest fire hold still.

He comes and lays my heart, all heated,
  On the hard anvil, minded so
Into His own fair shape to beat it
  With His great hammer, blow on blow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And at His heaviest blows hold still.

He takes my softened heart and beats it;
  The sparks fly off at every blow;
He turns it o’er and o’er and heats it,
  And lets it cool, and makes it glow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And in His mighty hand hold still.

Why should I murmur? for the sorrow
  Thus only longer-lived would be;
The end may come, and will tomorrow,
  When God has done His work in me;
So I say trusting, “As God will!”
And, trusting to the end, hold still.

—Julius Sturm.
The burden of suffering seems a tombstone hung about our necks, while in reality it is only the weight which is necessary to keep down the diver while he is hunting for pearls.—Richter.

9 JULY

A hardened heart

‘And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Genesis 4:9
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Zechariah 7:1–14

Cain did not escape. The Lord called to him. By his answer you may perceive how sin had hardened his heart. What ignorance to think his way hid from the Lord. What insolence in asking, Am I my brother’s keeper? But he was soon silenced, the fact pressed home upon his conscience and, though he was suffered to live, his life was a burden. He was driven from the presence of the Lord, from his ordinances and the society of his people, and made, for a season at least, a terror to himself. If he afterwards recovered his spirits, he seems to have done it by getting the better of his conscience and to have been given up judicially to an impenitent mind. This is the greatest punishment on this side hell, when a man has been convinced and distressed for sin and yet afterwards finds a way, without the application of the blood of sprinkling, to make himself whole, and can busy himself for the rest of his time with a worldly life, till at length his hour comes and he falls with all his sins unpardoned into the hands of the living God.

FOR MEDITATION: ‘Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, Today if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years …) Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end; While it is said, Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation (Hebrews 3:7–9, 12–15).

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 12 [4/4], GENESIS 4:8

July 8th

The will to loyalty

Choose you this day whom ye will serve. Joshua 24:15.

Will is the whole man active. I cannot give up my will, I must exercise it. I must will to obey, and I must will to receive God’s Spirit. When God gives a vision of truth it is never a question of what He will do, but of what we will do. The Lord has been putting before us all some big propositions, and the best thing to do is to remember what you did when you were touched by God before—the time when you were saved, or first saw Jesus, or realized some truth. It was easy then to yield allegiance to God; recall those moments now as the Spirit of God brings before you some new proposition.
“Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” It is a deliberate calculation, not something into which you drift easily; and everything else is in abeyance until you decide. The proposition is between you and God; do not confer with flesh and blood about it. With every new proposition other people get more and more ‘out of it,’ that is where the strain comes. God allows the opinion of His saints to matter to you, and yet you are brought more and more out of the certainty that others understand the step you are taking. You have no business to find out where God is leading, the only thing God will explain to you is Himself.
Profess to Him—‘I will be loyal.’ Immediately you choose to be loyal to Jesus Christ, you are a witness against yourself. Don’t consult other Christians, but profess before Him—‘I will serve Thee.’ Will to be loyal—and give other people credit for being loyal too.

July 8

“They shall mount up with wings as eagles.” (Isa. 40:31.)

THERE is a fable about the way the birds got their wings at the beginning. They were first made without wings. Then God made the wings and put them down before the wingless birds and said to them, “Come, take up these burdens and bear them.”
The birds had lovely plumage and sweet voices; they could sing, and their feathers gleamed in the sunshine, but they could not soar in the air. They hesitated at first when bidden to take up the burdens that lay at their feet, but soon they obeyed, and taking up the wings in their beaks, laid them on their shoulders to carry them.
For a little while the load seemed heavy and hard to bear, but presently, as they went on carrying the burdens, folding them over their hearts, the wings grew fast to their little bodies, and soon they discovered how to use them, and were lifted by them up into the air—the weights became wings.
It is a parable. We are the wingless birds, and our duties and tasks are the pinions God has made to lift us up and carry us heavenward. We look at our burdens and heavy loads, and shrink from them; but as we lift them and bind them about our hearts, they become wings, and on them we rise and soar toward God.
There is no burden which, if we lift it cheerfully and bear it with love in our hearts, will not become a blessing to us. God means our tasks to be our helpers; to refuse to bend our shoulders to receive a load, is to decline a new opportunity for growth.—J. R. Miller.

Blessed is any weight, however overwhelming, which God has been so good as to fasten with His own hand upon our shoulders.—F. W. Faber.