the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
THE ONE RULE OF CONDUCT
" Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us." - Ephesians 5:1-2
People have always been apt to think of the Gospel more as a message of deliverance than as a practical guide. And we all need to make an effort to prevent our natural indolence and selfishness from making us forget that the Gospel is quite as much a rule of conduct as a message of pardon.
It is both by the same act. In the very facts on which our redemption depends lies the law of our lives. Do not always be looking at Christ’s Cross only as your means of acceptance. Do not only be thinking of Christ’s Passion as that which has barred for you the gates of punishment, and has opened for you the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. It has done all that; but if you are going to stop there, you have only got hold of a very maimed and imperfect edition of the Gospel. The Cross is your pattern, as well as the anchor of your hope and the ground of your salvation - if it is anything at all to you. And it is not the ground of your salvation and the anchor of your hope unless it is your pattern. It is the one in exactly the same degree in which it is the other.
So all self-pleasing, all harsh insistence on your own claims, all neglect of suffering and sorrow and sin around you, comes under the lash of this condemnation. If Christian men and women would only learn to take away the scales from their eyes and souls, - not looking at Christ’s Cross with less absolute trustfulness, as that by which all their salvation comes, but also learning to look at it as closely and habitually as yielding the pattern to which their lives should be conformed, - and would let the heart-melting thankfulness which it evokes when gazed at as the ground of our hope prove itself true by its leading them to an effort at imitating that great love, and so walking worthy of the Gospel, how their lives would be transformed! It is far easier to fetter your life with yards of red-tape prescriptions - do this, do not do that; far easier to out-pharisee the Pharisees in punctilious scrupulosity, than it is honestly, and for one hour, to take the Cross of Christ as the pattern of your lives, and to shape yourselves by that.
One looks round upon a lethargic, a luxurious, a self-indulgent, a self seeking, a world-besotted professing Church, and asks, " Are these the people on whose hearts a cross is stamped? " Do these men - or rather let us say, do we live as becometh the Gospel which proclaims the divinity of self-sacrifice, and that the law of a perfect human life is perfect self-forgetfulness, even as the secret of the Divine nature is perfect love? " Walk worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
'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.
