the Fourth Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
THE LAW OF LIFE
Walk worthily of God, who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory. - 1 Thessalonians 2:12.
Here we have the whole law of Christian conduct in a nutshell. There may be many detailed commandments, but they can all he deduced from this one. We are lifted up above the region of petty prescriptions, and breathe a bracing mountain air. Instead of regulations, very many and very dry, we have a principle which needs thought and sympathy in order to apply it, and is to be carried out by the free action of our own judgments. The whole sum of Christian duty lies in conformity to the character of a Divine Person with whom we have loving relations.
The Old Testament says: "Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy." The New Testament says: " Be ye imitators of God, and walk in love." So then, whatever in that Divine nature of flashing brightness and infinite profundity is far beyond our apprehension and grasp, there are in that Divine nature elements - and those the best and divinest in it - which it is perfectly within the power of every man to copy.
Is there anything in God that is more God-like than righteousness and love? And is there any difference in essence between a man’s righteousness and God’s - between a man’s love and God’s? The same gases make combustion in the sun and on the earth, and the spectroscope tells you that it is so. The same radiant brightness that flames burning in the love, and flashes white in the purity of God, that may be reproduced n man.
Love is one thing all the universe over. Other elements of the bond that unites us to God are rather correspondent in us to what we find in Him. Our concavity, so to speak, answers to His convexity; our hollowness to His fulness; our emptiness to His all-sufficiency. So our faith, for instance, lays hold upon His faithfulness, and our obedience grasps, and bows before His commanding will. But the love with which I lay hold of Him is like the love with which He lays hold on me; and righteousness and purity, howsoever different may be their accompaniments in an Infinite and uncreated Nature from what they have in our limited and bounded and progressing being, in essence are one. So, " Be ye holy, for I am holy"; "Walk in the light, as He is in the light," is the law available for all conduct; and the highest Divine perfections, if I may speak of preeminence among them, are the imitable ones, whereby He becomes our Example and our Pattern.
'Music For The Soul' daily readings for a year from the writings of the Rev. Alexander Maclaren, D.D., selected and arranged by the Rev. Geo. Coates, published by A.C. Armstrong and Son, 51 East Tenth Street, (1897). The original text is in the Public Domain and this electronic version is free for anyone without cost or obligation. This a year long daily devotional was written by the Rev. Alexander Maclaren over 100 years ago. This Scottish pastor had a heart to follow Jesus and a love for souls.
