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Music For the Soul
Devotional: August 5th

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CHRIST’S YEARNING COMPASSION

It is the voice of my Beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to Me, . . . for My head is filled with dew, My locks with the drops of the night. - Song of Solomon 5:2

Men that bear precious gifts for the world do not often need to beseech that they shall be accepted, but He comes to it and "prays us with much entreaty that we should receive the gift." We are mostly too proud to sue for love, especially if once the petition has been repulsed, but He asks to be let into your heart because His nature and His name is Love, and, being such. He yearns to be loved by you, and He yearns to bless you. His asking entrance is, then, a revelation of His tenderness, a revelation of His lowliness, and also a revelation of His patience. Repulsed, He continues to plead; neglected and unanswered, still that uninterrupted craving admission goes on; Like Peter at the gate of Mary’s house, " He continues knocking." Christ never gives up anybody, Christ never abandons as hopeless the task of drawing any to Himself. We are weary of trying to reclaim the "irreclaimable " people, and we talk very glibly - some of us- about the "hopeless classes" that are outside the reach of moral influences, and the like. There are no such classes in His vision. With patience of a God, patience that accepts as its own the limits which He set for ours, "until seventy times seven," He will not be put away: but He pleads with you, my brother! as He did when you were a little child; as He did in the hot heyday of your early youth, when passions were strong, and novelty was attractive, and bonds were unwelcomed, and religion seemed too serious for the brightness that was around you; and as He has done with some of you in the maturity of life, when cares have burdened your hearts, and the deceitfulness of riches and the anxieties of life have made such a din that you could not hear His fingers on the door. He pleads with us all, and after every repulse: " I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord." At your heart, dear friend, by all your mercies and by all your cares, by the sudden impressions that have been made upon you, by the quick monitions of conscience, by the emotions of the mind within, by the words of human teachers, by His Book and Gospel, by all life and all nature which are in His hands, and by hidden ways which only a Divine foot can tread. He draws nearer to us, pleading with us - all for this, that we will let Him come into our hearts.

So, dear brother, when He stands before you with the old summons and the old promise on His lips, "Lift up your heads! O ye gates! and the King of Glory shall come in," I beseech you fling wide your hearts; say to Him: " If Thou hast judged me to be faithful, come and abide in my house "; and He will enter in, and bring with Him His gifts - peace, pardon, purity, and blessedness, and He and you will, even on earth, sit together at His table.

When after tossing and toil on the midnight sea the morning brings us to the shore, we shall find Him waiting with His welcome and a feast spread and prepared by His own hands, to which He will honour us by bidding us bring the results of the long night of labour; and so in highest fashion this great word will be fulfilled, and at His table in His Kingdom the King Himself shall sup with us and we with Him.

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