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Music For the Soul
Devotional: November 7th

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CHRIST’S VOLUNTARY SUFFERINGS

Therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. - John 10:17-18

All the suffering and solitude of Christ were voluntarily endured, and that for us. All man’s sorrow He experienced. Every ingredient that adds bitterness to our cup was familiar to His taste, ind He tasted them, as He tasted death, "for every man," that His experience of them might make them less hard for us to bear, and that the touch of His lips lingering on the cup might sweeten the draught for us.

His endurance of this, as of all the sorrows of human life, was at every moment a fresh act of willing surrender of Himself for us. He wore our manhood and He bore manhood’s griefs, not because He must, but because He would. He willed to be born. He willed to abide in the flesh. He willed, pang by pang, to bear our sorrows. He could have ended it all. But His love held Him here. That was the cord which bound Him to the stake. His enemies were wiser than they knew, when they mocked at Him, and said He saved others - and precisely, therefore - Himself He cannot save. So all that drear solitude in which He groped for a hand to grasp and found none was voluntarily borne and was as truly a part of His bearing the consequences of man’s sin, as when He bowed His head to death, and, therefore, to be gazed on by us with thankfulness as an element in the suffering wherewith He has redeemed us.

These thoughts may encourage us all to bear the necessary isolation of life, and in a special manner may strengthen some of us whom God in His providence has called upon to live outwardly lonely lives. But after all companionship, we have to live alone. Each man has to live his own life. We come singly into the world; and though God setteth the solitary in families, and there are manifold blessings of love and companionship for most of us, yet the awful burden of personality weighs upon us all. Alone we live in the depths of our hearts; alone we have to front joy and sorrow. If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself, and, if thou scornest, thou alone shall bear it. The heart knoweth its own bitterness. All human love feels its own limitations in presence of the impossibility of sharing the bodily sicknesses of those nearest to us. Two hearts shall be bound in closest love, and the one shall beat languidly in a wasted frame and the other throb in ruddy health. Two hearts shall be knit in tender sympathy, and the one shall have a sense of guilt from some dark passage in its past history, of which no shadow falls on the other. For some of us solitary days are appointed. We may think of Christ and see the prints of His footsteps before us on the loneliest road. If any of us are called to know the pain of unsatisfied longings for earthly companions, let us stretch out our hands to lay hold on the hand of that solitary Man who knew this, as He knows all, sorrow. He felt all the bitterness of having to stand alone, with no arm to lean upon and no heart to trust. If we are left alone, let us make Christ our companion. We shall not be utterly solitary if He is with us. Perhaps God takes away earthly props that our love and desires may reach higher, and twine round the throne where Christ sits.

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