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Daily Devotionals
Mornings and Evenings with Jesus
Devotional: August 21st

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Morning Devotional

With loving-kindness have I drawn thee. - Jeremiah 31:3.

THE gospel has been exceedingly injured, as to its practical influence and results, by being reduced to a mere republication of the law of nature, or a mere moral code. And we would ask boldly whether a man who receives only a class of moral rules from God, accompanied with a declaration that the observance of them shall hereafter be recompensed,-can such a man have the same feelings towards the blessed God as the man who believes he is in mercy redeemed from the lowest hell by the sacrifice of God’s own Son, that he is already blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ? And to order us to deny ourselves, to sacrifice our beloved lusts and passions and wish their eternal destruction, even if reason and conscience acknowledge the rectitude of the requirement, will never attach us to a sovereign power, or cause us to love these declarations and these truths.

To tell a man that every thing here is only in a state of probation and that every thing depends on his own prudence and his own fidelity,- can we imagine that this will ever produce a childlike confidence in God, or delight in his service? Assuredly not. And nothing will, but a manifestation of goodness so great as to overpower the heart and gain it: and such a manifestation of goodness there is. We have it in the manger, in the garden, on the cross, in the grave. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and gave his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.” “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” It is here, and here alone, we can be drawn with the “cords of love and with the bands of a man,” and effectually bound forever. And this, therefore, is the grand and only expedient the only wise God has devised and revealed to bring back the minds of his alienated creatures to himself.

It is obvious that the first step in the return of the criminal must be confidence. “We are saved by hope.” God knows this, and he provides for it, and he therefore banishes our fears, he expels from our minds all jealousies, and all unworthy conceptions of himself, and obtains the trust, the entire trust, of our poor hearts. He purges our consciences by the glorious gospel from dead works, that we may serve the living God. He enlarges the heart so that we can run in the way of his commandments. We have obtained not the spirit of bondage again to fear, but have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.” Hence the Apostle Jude says to Christians, “Keep yourselves in the love of God;” that is, love the commandments of his love to you, that you may live in the exercise of your love to God.

And this is the meaning of Paul to the Ephesians, when he speaks of their being “rooted and grounded in love;” he means in the discovery of his love, in the producing their love to him, as is obvious from what follows:-“That ye may be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”

Evening Devotional

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. - Isaiah 49:15.

OBSERVE, first, The improbability of the fear thus affectionately reproved. “Zion said the Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me;” but, by a striking and touching metaphor, God here shows us how unreasonable and unrighteous were those fears. “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” It is not probable that she should, but it is possible. It is the honour of females, that they are not only the fairer but the tenderer sex.

The young of all creatures are lovely and attractive always; but let us survey the image here. Here is a child, a harmless object, a helpless object, an endeared object, and towards which any one may feel compassion and tenderness. But we may observe that the child here is the mother’s own, “the son of her womb,” lately a part of herself, and endeared by the anxieties of bearing it, and the pain and peril of bringing it forth. Nor is this all; for the mother is a nursing mother, and the child is a sucking child, looking up with ineffable satisfaction to his benefactor, and with his little hands stroking the cheeks of her who feeds him.

This is the image, and therefore you must allow that it is not likely that a woman should “forget her sucking child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb.” But then, though it is improbable, it is a possible case. “Yea, they may forget.” More than one of them: “they may forget.” There are two supposable cases here. The first is, the mother may be bereft of reason, or not survive, and so not be able to remember. And the other, that she may be criminally and unnaturally led to hide herself from her own flesh. The instances are not rare in which the wretched mother has destroyed her own offspring- sometimes under the pressure of want, and sometimes to hide her shame.

When, therefore, we apply images to God, we must strip them of all their imperfections; we must apply them to him completely, and as far as possible divinely. The feelings of nature are nothing compared with the kindness of God. The heart of a Thornton and Howard was all ice and all steel compared with the benevolence of our God. He inspires all the tenderness that creatures feel; and he infinitely surpasses them himself. “If ye being evil,” says he, “know how to give good gifts unto your children; how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give his Holy Spirit to them that ask him.” “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,” says he, “yea, and much more abundantly; “she may forget, yet will I not forget thee.”

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