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Music For the Soul
Devotional: August 23rd

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THE SPIRIT OF PAUL’S LIFE’S WORK

I hold not my life of any account as dear unto myself, so that I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from, the Lord Jesus. - Acts 20:24.

Paul, contemplating for his life’s work preaching amongst the Gentiles, determines at the beginning, "I lay down all of which I used to be proud. If my Jewish descent and privileges stand in my way, I cast them aside. I wrap them together in one bundle, and toss them behind me, that I may be the better able to help some to whom they would have hindered my access." A man with a heart will throw off his silken robes that his arm may be bared to rescue and his feet free to run to succour. The only way to help people is to go down to their level. If you want to bless men you must identify yourself with them. It is no use standing on an eminence above them, and patronizingly talking down to them. You cannot scold, or hector, or lecture men into the possession and acceptance of religious truth if you take a position of superiority.

As our Master has taught us. if we want to make blind beggars see, we must take the blind beggars by the hand, "Paul" means "little"; "Saul" means "desired." He abandons the name that prophesied of favour and honour, to adopt a name that bears upon its very front a profession of humility. His very name is the condensation into a word of his abiding conviction. " I am less than the least of all saints." Perhaps even there may be an allusion to his low stature, which may be pointed at in the sarcasm of his enemies that his letters were strong, though his bodily presence was "weak." If he was, as Monsieur Renan calls him, "an ugly little Jew," the name has a double appropriateness. But, at all events, it is an expression of the spirit in which he sought to do his work. The more lofty the consciousness of his vocation, the more lowly will a true man’s estimate of himself be. The higher my thought of what God has given me grace to do, the more shall I feel weighed down by the consciousness of my unfitness to do it.

So, for all hope, for all success in our work, for all growth in Christian grace and character, this disposition of lowly self-abasement and recognised unworthiness and infirmity is absolutely indispensable. The mountain-tops that lift themselves to the stars are barren, and few springs find their rise there. It is in the lowly valleys that the flowers grow and the rivers run. And it is they who are humble and lowly in heart to whom God gives strength to serve Him, and the joy of accepted service. Learn your true life’s task by identifying yourself with the humbler brethren whom you would help. Learn the spirit of lowly self-abasement. And, above all, learn this, that unless you have the life of God in your heart, you have no life at all. If you have that faith by which we receive into our spirits Christ’s own spirit to be our life, then you are a new creature, with a new name, perhaps dimly visible, and faintly audible, amidst the imperfections of earth, but sure to shine in the Lamb’s Book of Life; and to be read, "with tumults of acclaim," before the angels of Heaven. "I will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it."

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