Milo

May 19th

“Out of the wreck I rise”

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Romans 8:35.

God does not keep a man immune from trouble; He says—“I will be with him in trouble.” It does not matter what actual troubles in the most extreme form get hold of a man’s life, not one of them can separate him from his relationship to God. We are “more than conquerors in all these things.” Paul is not talking of imaginary things, but of things that are desperately actual; and he says we are super-victors in the midst of them, not by our ingenuity, or by our courage, or by anything other than the fact that not one of them affects our relationship to God in Jesus Christ. Rightly or wrongly, we are where we are, exactly in the condition we are in. I am sorry for the Christian who has not something in his circumstances he wishes was not there.
“Shall tribulation …?” Tribulation is never a noble thing; but let tribulation be what it may—exhausting, galling, fatiguing, it is not able to separate us from the love of God. Never let cares or tribulations separate you from the fact that God loves you.
“Shall anguish …?”—can God’s love hold when everything says that His love is a lie, and that there is no such thing as justice?
“Shall famine …?”—can we not only believe in the love of God but be more than conquerors, even while we are being starved?
Either Jesus Christ is a deceiver and Paul is deluded, or some extraordinary thing happens to a man who holds on to the love of God when the odds are all against God’s character. Logic is silenced in the face of every one of these things. Only one thing can account for it—the love of God in Christ Jesus. “Out of the wreck I rise” every time.

May 19

“And it came to pass, before he had done speaking … and he said, Blessed be Jehovah … who hath not forsaken his lovingkindness and his truth.” (Gen. 24:15, 27.)

EVERY right prayer is answered before the prayer itself is finished—before we have “done speaking.” This is because God has pledged His Word to us that whatsoever we ask in Christ’s name (that is, in oneness with Christ and His will) and in faith, shall be done.
As God’s Word cannot fail, whenever we meet those simple conditions in prayer, the answer to our prayer has been granted and completed in Heaven as we pray, even though its showing forth on earth may not occur until long afterward.
So it is well to close every prayer with praise to God for the answer that He has already granted; He who never forsakes His loving-kindness and His truth. (See Daniel 9:20––27 and 10:12.)—Messages for the Morning Watch.
When we believe for a blessing, we must take the attitude of faith; and begin to act and pray as if we had the blessing. We must treat God as if He had given us our request. We must lean our weight over upon Him for the thing that we have claimed, and just take it for granted that He gives it, and is going to continue to give it. This is the attitude of trust.

When the wife is married, she at once falls into a new attitude, and acts in accordance with the fact; and so when we take Christ as our Savior, as our Sanctifier, as our Healer, or as our Deliverer, He expects us to fall into the attitude of recognizing Him in the capacity that we have claimed, and expect Him to be to us all that we have trusted Him for.—Selected.

“The thing I ask when God doth bid me pray,
Begins in that same act to come my way.”

19 MAY

The sweet savour of Jesus

‘And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.’ Genesis 8:21
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Genesis 8:13–22

The Lord’s answer of peace to Noah: here is a gracious promise, I will not again curse the ground. The reason is assigned: for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth up. This seems a reason of the same kind as that before assigned for the destruction of the earth—the for may be rendered though.
(i) Sin is so deeply rooted that judgements cannot remove it. If the aboundings of sin were to be always followed with a deluge, there must be a new flood at least in every generation. God, having once shown his displeasure this way, will wait to be gracious. But this we owe to the sweet savour of Jesus. The Lord saw and knew that the new race of mankind would be no better than the old.
(ii) The evil of man cannot frustrate the grace of the Lord. Vile as they are, he will have a people out of them that shall show forth his praise.
(iii) The continuance of the seasons is an earnest and pledge of the Lord’s faithfulness to every part of his Word. We expect harvests and obtain them because he thus was pleased to engage himself to Noah. So all that his people hope for, from his Word, shall be surely fulfilled, and so likewise the weight of all his threatenings shall fall heavy upon the heads of the wicked, for he is not a man that he should lie or the son of man that he should repent [Numbers 23:19].

FOR MEDITATION: The gospel gives a blessed freedom from the power of outward sin, but the root of sin in the heart still remains and will yield bitter fruit: unbelief, self-will, self-righteousness and pride, a wandering heart, a vain, ungoverned imagination, a numbness of spirit amounting to an almost total indisposition to divine things.… But though sorrowful, we may be always rejoicing, for we have a mighty and a merciful Saviour, and in him we have righteousness and strength. In him we are complete and he is full of compassion. He knows our frame and remembers that we are but dust.

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 19 [1/1], GENESIS 8:21

May 18th

Careful unreasonableness

Behold the fowls of the air … consider the lilies of the field. Matthew 6:26, 28.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they simply are! Think of the sea, the air, the sun, the stars and the moon—all these are, and what a ministration they exert. So often we mar God’s designed influence through us by our self-conscious effort to be consistent and useful. Jesus says that there is only one way to develop spiritually, and that is by concentration on God. ‘Do not bother about being of use to others, believe on Me’—pay attention to the Source, and out of you will flow rivers of living water. We cannot get at the springs of our natural life by common sense, and Jesus is teaching that growth in spiritual life does not depend on our watching it, but on concentration on our Father in heaven. Our heavenly Father knows the circumstances we are in, and if we keep concentrated on Him we will grow spiritually as the lilies.
The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mould us.
If you want to be of use to God, get rightly related to Jesus Christ and He will make you of use unconsciously every minute you live.

May 18

“I was crushed … so much so that I despaired even of life, but that was to make me rely not on myself, but on the God who raises the dead.” (2 Cor. 1:8, 9)

“Pressed out of measure and pressed to all length;
Pressed so intensely it seems, beyond strength;
Pressed in the body and pressed in the soul,
Pressed in the mind till the dark surges roll.
Pressure by foes, and a pressure from friends.
Pressure on pressure, till life nearly ends.

“Pressed into knowing no helper but God;
Pressed into loving the staff and the rod.
Pressed into liberty where nothing clings;
Pressed into faith for impossible things.
Pressed into living a life in the Lord,
Pressed into living a Christ-life outpoured.”

THE pressure of hard places makes us value life. Every time our life is given back to us from such a trial, it is like a new beginning, and we learn better how much it is worth, and make more of it for God and man. The pressure helps us to understand the trials of others, and fits us to help and sympathize with them.
There is a shallow, superficial nature, that gets hold of a theory or a promise lightly, and talks very glibly about the distrust of those who shrink from every trial; but the man or woman who has suffered much never does this, but is very tender and gentle, and knows what suffering really means. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Death worketh in you.”
Trials and hard places are needed to press us forward, even as the furnace fires in the hold of that mighty ship give force that moves the piston, drives the engine, and propels that great vessel across the sea in the face of the winds and waves.
—A. B. Simpson.

“Out of the presses of pain,
  Cometh the soul’s best wine;
And the eyes that have shed no rain,
  Can shed but little shine.”