Milo

May 25th

The test of self-interest

If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left. Genesis 13:9.

As soon as you begin to live the life of faith in God, fascinating and luxurious prospects will open up before you, and these things are yours by right; but if you are living the life of faith you will exercise your right to waive your rights, and let God choose for you. God sometimes allows you to get into a place of testing where your own welfare would be the right and proper thing to consider if you were not living a life of faith; but if you are, you will joyfully waive your right and leave God to choose for you. This is the discipline by means of which the natural is transformed into the spiritual by obedience to the voice of God.
Whenever right is made the guidance in the life, it will blunt the spiritual insight. The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best. It would seem the wisest thing in the world for Abraham to choose, it was his right, and the people around would consider him a fool for not choosing. Many of us do not go on spiritually because we prefer to choose what is right instead of relying on God to choose for us. We have to learn to walk according to the standard which has its eye on God. “Walk before Me.”

May 25

“I endure all things for the sake of God’s own people; so that they also may obtain salvation … and with it eternal glory.” (2 Tim. 2:10.) (Weymouth.)

IF Job could have known as he sat there in the ashes, bruising his heart on this problem of Providence—that in the trouble that had come upon him he was doing what one man may do to work out the problem for the world, he might again have taken courage. No man lives to himself. Job’s life is but your life and mine written in larger text. … So, then, though we may not know what trials wait on any of us, we can believe that, as the days in which Job wrestled with his dark maladies are the only days that make him worth remembrance, and but for which his name had never been written in the book of life, so the days through which we struggle, finding no way, but never losing the light, will be the most significant we are called to live.—Robert Collyer.
Who does not know that our most sorrowful days have been amongst our best? When the face is wreathed in smiles and we trip lightly over meadows bespangled with spring flowers, the heart is often running to waste.
The soul which is always blithe and gay misses the deepest life. It has its reward, and it is satisfied to its measure, though that measure is a very scanty one. But the heart is dwarfed; and the nature, which is capable of the highest heights, the deepest depths, is undeveloped; and life presently burns down to its socket without having known the resonance of the deepest chords of joy.
“Blessed are they that mourn.” Stars shine brightest in the long dark night of winter. The gentians show their fairest bloom amid almost inaccessible heights of snow and ice.
God’s promises seem to wait for the pressure of pain to trample out their richest juice as in a wine-press. Only those who have sorrowed know how tender is the “Man of Sorrows.”
—Selected.

Thou hast but little sunshine, but thy long glooms are wisely appointed thee; for perhaps a stretch of summer weather would have made thee as a parched land and barren wilderness. Thy Lord knows best, and He has the clouds and the sun at His disposal.—Selected.

“It is a gray day.” “Yes, but dinna ye see the patch of blue?”—Scotch Shoemaker.

25 MAY

Gracious living

‘And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.’ Genesis 12:2
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Ephesians 4:17–5:21

And thou shalt be a blessing: blessed in thyself and a blessing to others. Believers indeed are by the world accounted a burden, as Lot was in Sodom, yet each one is a public blessing. Thus they are compared to light, to salt, and so forth. Consider:
(i) their usefulness. The grace of God teaches them benevolence and usefulness. If any professor [of the faith] lives to himself it is a bad sign. I hope we have not so learnt Christ.
(ii) their example. They cannot do all they would, yet their example has some good effect, to restrain the boldness of sin and to draw others to seek after the Lord likewise (1 Peter 3:1).
(iii) their prayer. If Sodom had not been dreadfully abandoned, the prayer of Abraham would have saved it; and had there been ten of these blessings found in it, it would have escaped destruction.
(iv) [their protection]—by their interests and concerns being interwoven at present in the world. They are the wheat, for whose sake the tares are so long spared. If the world could have its wish and the people whom they hate were quite removed, they would not be suffered to go on long with impunity.

FOR MEDITATION: Tempus fugit very fast indeed. I am already more than three months in my seventy-second year. So the almanac tells me, otherwise I should scarcely perceive it. I preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, and tell my hearers that if they love him for his great love to them, they ought to love one another. I have nothing to do with controversies. Church folks, dissenters, methodists of all sorts come to hear me, and they are all welcome, and all sit very quietly. I am waiting for my dismission, which I trust I shall receive at the best time. I have some longing (though I am not impatient) to be at home—there to see my dear Mary and Eliza—and above all to see him, whom having not yet seen, I trust is the Lord and beloved of my heart. To see him as he is, and to be like him. This is worth dying for, and worth living for, till he shall say, Come up hither.
John Newton to John Ryland, 26 November 1796

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 23 [3/3], GENESIS 12:2

May 24th

The delight of despair

And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. Rev. 1:17.

It may be that like the apostle John you know Jesus Christ intimately, when suddenly He appears with no familiar characteristic at all, and the only thing you can do is to fall at His feet as dead. There are times when God cannot reveal Himself in any other way than in His majesty, and it is the awfulness of the vision which brings you to the delight of despair; if you are ever to be raised up, it must be by the hand of God.
“He laid His right hand upon me.” In the midst of the awfulness, a touch comes, and you know it is the right hand of Jesus Christ. The right hand not of restraint nor of correction nor of chastisement, but the right hand of the Everlasting Father. Whenever His hand is laid upon you, it is ineffable peace and comfort, the sense that “underneath are the everlasting arms,” full of sustaining and comfort and strength. When once His touch comes, nothing at all can cast you into fear again. In the midst of all His ascended glory the Lord Jesus comes to speak to an insignificant disciple, and to say—“Fear not.” His tenderness is ineffably sweet. Do I know Him like that?
Watch some of the things that strike despair. There is despair in which there is no delight, no horizon, no hope of anything brighter; but the delight of despair comes when I know that “in me (that is in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.” I delight to know that there is that in me which must fall prostrate before God when He manifests Himself, and if I am ever to be raised up it must be by the hand of God. God can do nothing for me until I get to the limit of the possible.

May 24

“Sarah bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.” (Gen. 21:2.)

THE counsel of the Lord standeth forever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations” (Psalm 33:11). But we must be prepared to wait God’s time. God has His set times. It is not for us to know them; indeed, we cannot know them; we must wait for them.
If God had told Abraham in Haran that he must wait for thirty years until he pressed the promised child to his bosom, his heart would have failed him. So, in gracious love, the length of the weary years was hidden, and only as they were nearly spent, and there were only a few more months to wait, God told him that “according to the time of life, Sarah shall have a son.” (Gen. 18:14.)
The set time came at last; and then the laughter that filled the patriarch’s home made the aged pair forget the long and weary vigil.
Take heart, waiting one, thou waitest for One who cannot disappoint thee; and who will not be five minutes behind the appointed moment: ere long “your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
Ah, happy soul, when God makes thee laugh! Then sorrow and crying shall flee away forever, as darkness before the dawn.—Selected.
It is not for us who are passengers, to meddle with the chart and with the compass. Let that all-skilled Pilot alone with His own work.—Hall.

“Some things cannot be done in a day. God does not make a sunset glory in a moment, but for days may be massing the mist out of which He builds His palaces beautiful in the west.”

“Some glorious morn—but when? Ah, who shall say?
The steepest mountain will become a plain,
And the parched land be satisfied with rain.
The gates of brass all broken; iron bars,
Transfigured, form a ladder to the stars.
Rough places plain, and crooked ways all straight,
For him who with a patient heart can wait.
These things shall be on God’s appointed day:
It may not be tomorrow—yet it may.”