Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: February 24th

GOVERNMENT OF SELF

I buffet my body, and bring it into bondage: lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected. - 1 Corinthians 9:27

THE great love of Christ is not contented with simply breaking the bondage of the slaves. It has more to do for them before it reaches its end. Emancipation is not enough. It is only a step in the process, a means towards a more wonderful result. He liberates them that He may ennoble them. He sets them free from the tyrants who held them captive that He may crown them with a crown of glory. He brings them that were bound out of the prison-house, and causes them to have rule among princes. So far-reaching are His great purposes that to loose us from our sins seems inadequate to fulfill the counsel of His love, unless it be followed by the wonderful bestowal of kingly dignity.

And what does that imply? Are we to lose ourselves in dim, vague thoughts of some future millennial reign and vulgar outward glories? I think not. John believed - and any man that has learned the Christian view of life will say "Amen" to the belief - that every man who has become the servant of Christ is the king and lord of everything else; that to submit to Him is to rule all besides. "He hath made us kings" in the act of submission; and on the head that bends before His throne in grateful love and lowly confidence, He stoops to lay lightly a crown, to raise the man up and say, "Arise and reign!"

Reign over what? First of all, over the only kingdom that any man really has, and that is himself. We are meant to be monarchs of this tumultuous and rebellious kingdom within. Vice and lust, fancies, tastes, whims, purposes, desires, they all go boiling and seething in our natures. It is meant that we should keep a tight hand on them, and be lords over them, and not let them run away with us, and carry you whither they would, as so many of us do in our hours of weakness. In our inmost heart and conscience we know that we are meant to be lords of ourselves. There is something in each of us that responds to the noble words - self-control, self-denial; but the difficulty is how to carry them out, how to reign and rule over this rebellious kingdom within us. Law has no power to get itself obeyed. Conscience shares in law’s weakness. It is a voice, authoritative in speech, but without force to compel attention. We cannot curb ourselves. There must be a power without to reinforce our wavering wills and to hold down our rebellious desires. Christ does this for us, and no person or system or power but He can do it thoroughly for any man.