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Daily Devotionals
Mornings and Evenings with Jesus
Devotional: October 13th

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Morning Devotional

God is love. - 1 John 4:8.

WHEN John says, “God is love,” he means to intimate not only that love is God’s attribute, but that it is God’s character. Indeed, we cannot apply the word character to God precisely as we do to men. Among men, character is always the consequence of habit, as habit is frequently the result of previous disposition; and always the result of repeated action. But when we say that love is God’s character, we mean that he is peculiarly distinguished by it, and that all his perfections are, so to speak, so many parts and modifications of love. His wisdom is his love devising and arranging; his power is his love executing; his truth is his love fulfilling; his holiness is his love forbidding whatever would be injurious to us; his anger is his love chastening us for our faults and reducing us to reformation and repentance; and even his threatenings are the expressions of his love to us, as they are our guard and our warning, and are designed to prevent the very evils they denounce. God has written two huge volumes upon this subject: it would take up years and ages to read them through properly; all we can do, therefore, is to quote a chapter or a verse or two from each of them.

The first of these volumes is Creation. Creation is immense; but we fix upon our own world. “The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land.” “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” and it is filled with his riches. “The day is his, and the night also is his;” he “makes the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice.” He has “appointed the moon for seasons, and the sun knoweth his going down.” He has made “summer and winter.” And all these seasons succeed each other in a regular order, and are prepared gradually to melt into each other without any disruption, and all of them bringing forward their appropriate advantages and pleasures, so that “the year is crowned with his goodness.” Then, as Cowper says, look at “the sweet interchange of hill and vale, and wood and lawn, and land and water.”

Then we may observe how obvious it is that God intended not only to provide for our wants, but our gratifications; not only for our support, but our delight. Eating and drinking are essential to our support; but our God might have rendered our food and beverage as nauseous as medicines. He has rendered them agreeable, so that in partaking of them we never think of necessity, but only of gratification. Why the perfume and the breath of the rose and the lily? “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these:” it can only be designed for indulgence. The apple-tree yields a fruit important to man, but God could have caused it to yield this fruit without the previous process of blossoming: this was intended to charm us before he enriched us.

But we must just glance at the other volume,-the volume of Revelation, which is much larger and nobler than the first. God has “magnified his word above all his name!” “Behold,” says God, “I create new heavens and a- new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”

“God, in the person of his Son,

Hath all his mightiest works outdone,”

sings our good Dr. Watts; and the apostle says that “God hath shined into our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.” And our Saviour himself said, “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” But general reflections impress little compared with facts and incidents. The one is like surveying a prospect from a high hill; the other is like descending into the vale and examining all the contents of the particular scenes and objects.

The Apostle John, having asserted “that God is love,” immediately mentions an instance,-a peculiar instance, from which the very angels fetch their fairest and fullest proof of the doctrine; for, said he, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Evening Devotional

I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. - Acts 20:27.

IT has already been shown that “the counsel of God” here refers to the gospel; and here with that reference we observe, first, That there is in this subject itself, and the manner of its announcement, a fulness of affluence and harmony. Though it be a whole yet it has a thousand parts; and the whole is a mighty whole too. The Apostle therefore calls it the “unsearchable riches of Christ” which he was to preach among the Gentiles, and he prays for the Ephesians that they might “be filled with all the fulness of God.”

Secondly, It is intimated that it must he preached without partiality, both with regard to the persons addressed, and to the subject of the address. To all hearers he says he had declared the “counsel of God,” without abridgment, reserve, or concealment, so that by “the manifestation of the truth he had commended himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.

Thirdly, It is intimated that in doing this he had to withstand and resist many temptations; and these temptations still exist. If a minister brings forward the doctrines of grace in all their fulness and harmony, he will be subjected to the charge of Antinomianism; and if he enforce the precepts in all their Spirituality and extensiveness, embracing all personal and religious duties which they enjoin, he will subject himself to the charge of legality; and if he unfold the work of the Spirit as experienced in and by all real Christians, so that they may say with Newton, I have “learned by experience,” or that “true religion,” as Hart says, “is more than notion, something must be known and felt,” he will be charged with enthusiasm, as if either love or sorrow could be unfelt.

Religion must be within in the principle before it can be seen without in the conduct. Now when all these things, this doctrine, this experience, and this practice are combined, when regardless of the charge of Antinomianism, these doctrines are preached clearly and fully; and when, regardless of the charge of enthusiasm, Christian experience and the agency and influence of the Holy Ghost in the souls of men is brought forward and insisted upon; and when, regardless of the charge of legality, pious tempers and a holy walk and conversation becoming the gospel is enjoined, the minister can also say with Paul, “I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.”

Considering the mixture there was in the congregations which heard Paul preach, and that there is always in every congregation, it is probable, if not certain, that the preacher who does not “shun to declare unto all the counsel of God” will give some offence. But says the Apostle, “If I seek to please men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” Daniel reproved Belshazzar as if he had been a common man; and John’s doctrine was as rough as the garments he wore; and he dared to tell majesty to its face, that it was not above law any more than one of his subjects: “It is not lawful for thee to have her.” Paul knew the character and conduct of Felix and Drusilla, but “he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.”

It is a poor sermon, says George Whitfield, that gives no offence, that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself, nor with the preacher. It was a noble eulogium that Louis XIV. passed on one of his preachers, Massilon: “I don’t know how it is; when I hear my other chaplains I admire them, but when I hear Massilon I always go away displeased with myself.” There could not be a finer encomium. And, says the Apostle, “Our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and in godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.” And he knew that this satisfaction of his would bear attestation. “I call God,” says he, “to witness that I am pure from the blood of all men,” and the blood of souls is the most defiling, and cries out the most for vengeance; for “I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.”

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