Milo

May 10th

Take the initiative

Add to your faith virtue … (“Furnish your faith with resolution.”) (MOFFATT) 2 Peter 1:5.

“Add” means there is something we have to do. We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save ourselves nor sanctify ourselves, God does that; but God will not give us good habits, He will not give us character, He will not make us walk aright. We have to do all that ourselves, we have to work out the salvation God has worked in. “Add” means to get into the habit of doing things, and in the initial stages it is difficult. To take the initiative is to make a beginning, to instruct yourself in the way you have to go.
Beware of the tendency of asking the way when you know it perfectly well. Take the initiative, stop hesitating, and take the first step. Be resolute when God speaks, act in faith immediately on what He says, and never revise your decisions. If you hesitate when God tells you to do a thing, you endanger your standing in grace. Take the initiative, take it yourself, take the step with your will now, make it impossible to go back. Burn your bridges behind you—‘I will write that letter’; ‘I will pay that debt.’ Make the thing inevitable.
We have to get into the habit of hearkening to God about everything, to form the habit of finding out what God says. If, when a crisis comes, we instinctively turn to God, we know that the habit has been formed. We have to take the initiative where we are, not where we are not.

May 10

“I had fainted unless …!” (Psalm 27:13)
“FAINT NOT!”

HOW great is the temptation at this point! How the soul sinks, the heart grows sick, and the faith staggers under the keen trials and testings which come into our lives in times of special bereavement and suffering.
“I cannot bear up any longer, I am fainting under this providence. What shall I do? God tells me not to faint. But what can one do when he is fainting?”
What do you do when you are about to faint physically? You cannot do anything. You cease from your own doings. In your faintness, you fall upon the shoulder of some strong loved one. You lean hard. You rest. You lie still and trust.
It is so when we are tempted to faint under affliction. God’s message to us is not, “Be strong and of good courage,” for He knows our strength and courage have fled away. But it is that sweet word, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Hudson Taylor was so feeble in the closing months of his life that he wrote a dear friend: “I am so weak I cannot write; I cannot read my Bible; I cannot even pray. I can only lie still in God’s arms like a little child, and trust.”
This wondrous man of God with all his spiritual power came to a place of physical suffering and weakness where he could only lie still and trust.
And that is all God asks of you, His dear child, when you grow faint in the fierce fires of affliction. Do not try to be strong. Just be still and know that He is God, and will sustain you, and bring you through.
“God keeps His choicest cordials for our deepest faintings.”

“Stay firm and let thine heart take courage.” (Psa. 27:14—After Osterwald.)

Stay firm, He has not failed thee
  In all the past,
And will He go and leave thee
  To sink at last?
Nay, He said He will hide thee
  Beneath His wing;
And sweetly there in safety
  Thou mayest sing.

—Selected

10 MAY

Sin’s guilt removed

‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Genesis 3:15
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Romans 6:1–14

The nature of the Redeemer’s work is set forth by a conflict with the serpent and his seed, in which:
(i) Christ should be completely victorious, removing the guilt of sin, the curse of the law from his people; that he should destroy death and him that had the power of death (that is the devil). These great things he has already done. Sin is expiated—God is reconciled, death is disarmed of its sting and Satan is a vanquished enemy who can do nothing but by permission. And there is a day appointed which will openly solemnize this triumph and bruise this enemy finally under his feet.
(ii) He should conquer by suffering. Yet great as these were in the garden and upon the cross, his bloody agony and bloody death, only his heel was affected—his human nature and that life which he took on purpose that he might lay it down. His head was invulnerable; his divine nature and his life that he had in himself were out of the enemy’s reach (Romans 6:9; Revelation 1:18).
FOR MEDITATION:
I saw one hanging on a tree,
Alas! I knew not what I did,
In agonies and blood;
But now my tears are vain;
Who fixed his languid eyes on me,
Where shall my trembling soul be hid?
As near his cross I stood.
For I the LORD have slain.

Sure, never till my latest breath,
A second look he gave, which said,
Can I forget that look;
‘I freely all forgive;
It seemed to charge me with his death,
This blood is for thy ransom paid,
Though not a word he spoke.
I die, that thou may’st live.’

My conscience felt, and owned the guilt,
Thus, while his death my sin displays,
And plunged me in despair;
In all its blackest hue;
I saw my sins his blood had spilt,
(Such is the mystery of grace)
And helped to nail him there.
It seals my pardon too.

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 10 [2/4], GENESIS 3:15

May 9th

Grasp without reach

Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint. Proverbs 29:18 (R.V.).

There is a difference between an ideal and a vision. An ideal has no moral inspiration; a vision has. The people who give themselves over to ideals rarely do anything. A man’s conception of Deity may be used to justify his deliberate neglect of his duty. Jonah argued that because God was a God of justice and of mercy, therefore everything would be all right. I may have a right conception of God, and that may be the very reason why I do not do my duty. But wherever there is vision, there is also a life of rectitude because the vision imparts moral incentive.
Ideals may lull to ruin. Take stock of yourself spiritually and see whether you have ideals only or if you have vision.

‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?’

“Where there is no vision …” When once we lose sight of God, we begin to be reckless, we cast off certain restraints, we cast off praying, we cast off the vision of God in little things, and begin to act on our own initiative. If we are eating what we have out of our own hand, doing things on our own initiative without expecting God to come in, we are on the downward path, we have lost the vision. Is our attitude to-day an attitude that springs from our vision of God? Are we expecting God to do greater things than He has ever done? Is there a freshness and vigour in our spiritual outlook?

May 9

“Abraham stood yet before the Lord.” (Gen. 18:22)

THE friend of God can plead with Him for others. Perhaps Abraham’s height of faith and friendship seems beyond our little possibilities. Do not be discouraged, Abraham grew; so may we. He went step by step, not by great leaps.
The man whose faith has been deeply tested and who has come off victorious, is the man to whom supreme tests must come.
The finest jewels are most carefully cut and polished; the hottest fires try the most precious metal. Abraham would never have been called the Father of the Faithful if he had not been proved to the uttermost. Read Genesis, twenty-second chapter:
“Take thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest.” See him going with a chastened, wistful, yet humbly obedient heart up Moriah’s height, with the idol of his heart beside him about to be sacrificed at the command of God whom he had faithfully loved and served!
What a rebuke to our questionings of God’s dealings with us! Away with all doubting explanations of this stupendous scene! It was an object lesson for the ages. Angels were looking.
Shall this man’s faith stand forever for the strength and help of all God’s people? Shall it be known through him that unfaltering faith will always prove the faithfulness of God?
Yes; and when faith has borne victoriously its uttermost test, the angel of the Lord—who? The Lord Jesus, Jehovah, He in whom “all the promises of God are yea and amen”—spoke to him, saying, “Now I know that thou fearest God.” Thou hast trusted me to the uttermost. I will also trust thee; thou shalt ever be My friend, and I will bless thee, and make thee a blessing.
It is always so, and always will be. “They that are of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.”—Selected.
It is no small thing to be on terms of friendship with God.