Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: August 6th

THE RESPONSIBLE POWER OF CHOICE

She obeyed not the voice; she received not correction; she trusted not in the Lord; she drew not near to her God. - Zephaniah 3:2

"If any man will open the door" - the door has no handle on the outside. It opens from within. Christ knocks; we open. I do not need to plunge into metaphysics: it is a plain fact that men can, and that men do, reject all this pleading love and meek patience of the beseeching Christ. It is the history of the lives of some of us; hundreds of times we have done it, and have settled ourselves into the attitude and habit of doing it. Do not be sophisticated out of the recognition of the fact that it is your fault if you are not a Christian by any quasi-philosophical theory about responsibility and the like. "If any man open the door," says Christ. The man has to open it; and if the man does not open it, it stops shut.

And how do you open it? If, when He comes to you and says, "Child! thou art sinful; I have died for thee! trust thyself to Me," thou sayest, "Amen! Lord, I trust"; thou hast opened the door. What we call faith - by which we simply mean the yielding of ourselves to Him, and the leaning upon His finished work and His mighty love and His Divine person for our salvation and our purity and our all- is the opening of the door. We open when in faith we yield the will, and say to Him, " Come in, Thou Blessed of the Father! "

And oh! is it not plain that that simple condition is a condition not imposed by any arbitrary action on His part, but a condition indispensable from the very nature of the case? A man cannot get these Divine blessings if He does not want them. You take a hermetically sealed bottle, and put it into the sea; it may float about in mid-ocean for a century, surrounded by a shoreless ocean, and it will be as dry and empty inside at the end as it was at the beginning. So you and I float, live, move, and have our being in that great ocean of the Divine love in Christ; but you can cork up your hearts, and wax them over with an impenetrable cover, through which that grace does not come. And you do do it, some of you. If you are doing that, your heart must remain barred to His entrance. There is nothing for it but that if you do not let Christ come in, He must stop outside; and if He stops outside, there stop out with Him all the blessings that He brings. If you do not believe yourself to be a sinner, you will never feel that you want pardon; if you do not feel that you want pardon, you will never take Him for your Saviour; if you do not take Him for your Saviour, you cannot be saved. God cannot do it, and Christ cannot do it. They have done all they could for you; and He stands before the world and says: "Judge, I pray you, betwixt Me and My vineyard. What could have been done more to it that I have not done in it? " He has done all He could. Oh, my brother! open the door, and the great rejoicing tide shall flow in and flood your heart. " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be saved."