Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: February 26th

THE RULE OF CHRIST

My yoke is easy, and My burden is light - Matthew 11:30

If you want to rule yourselves let Christ rule you. Put your trust in Him; leave yourself in His hand; lay yourselves at His feet; rest upon His great sacrifice; look to Him for forgiveness; and then look to Him for marching orders, and for pure living, and for everything else. He will give power to your will, however feeble it was before, and susceptibility to your conscience that it never had when it was case-hardened by your love of evil, and you will be able to subdue the passions which would sweep you away and would laugh at all other control. Put the reins into His hands, and He will bridle and tame your wild desires. Submit to Him, and He will make you "lord of yourself, though not of lands " - man’s noblest kingship.

We are like some of those little Rajahs whose states adjoin our British possessions, who have trouble and difficulty with revolted subjects, and fall back upon the great neighbouring power, saying: "Come and help me; subdue my people for me, and I will put the territory into your hands." Go to Christ and say: "Lord! they have rebelled against me! These passions, these lusts, these follies, these weaknesses, these sinful habits of mine, they have rebelled against me! What am I to do with them? Do Thou come and bring peace into the land, and Thine shall be the authority." And He will come and loose you from your sins, and make you kings.

And there is another realm over which we may rule; and that is, this bewitching and bewildering world of time and sense, with its phantasmagoria and its illusions and its lies, that draw us away from the real life and truth and blessedness. Do not let the world master you! It will, unless you have put yourself under Christ’s control. He will make you king over all outward things, by enabling you to despise them in comparison with the sweetness which you find in Him, and so to get the highest good out of them. He will make you their lord by helping you to use all the things seen and temporal as means to reach a fuller possession of the things unseen and eternal. Their noblest use is to be the ladder by which we climb to reach the treasures which are above. They are meant to be symbols of the eternal, like painted windows through which our eye may travel to the light beyond, which gives them all their brilliancy. He rules the waves who, with a strong hand on the tiller, makes the currents serve to bear his barque to the harbor. And he rules outward things who bends and coerces them to be the servants of his spirit in its highest aspirations, and so turns them to their noblest use.