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Music For the Soul
Devotional: November 30th

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THE DIVINE-HUMAN SAVIOUR

This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. - Luke 15:2

Does not the love of Jesus help us to realise how truly bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and bearing a heart thrilling with all innocent human emotions, that Divine Saviour was? We, like Him, have known what it is to feel, because of approaching separation from dear ones, the need for a tenderer tenderness. At such moments the masks of use and wont drop away, and we are eager to find some word, to put our whole souls into some look, our whole strength into one clinging embrace that may express all our love, and may be a joy to two hearts for ever after to remember. The Master knew that longing, and felt the pain of separation: and He, too, yielded to the human impulse which makes the thought of parting the key to unlock the hidden chambers of the most jealously-guarded heart, and let the shyest of its emotions come out for once into the daylight. But there is not only in this a wonderful expression of the true humanity of the Christ, but along with that a suggestion of something more sacred and deeper still. For surely, amidst all the parting scenes that the world’s literature has enshrined, amidst all the examples of self-oblivion at the last moment, when a martyr has been the comforter of his weeping friends, there are none that without degradation to this can be set by the side of this supreme and unique instance of self-oblivion. Did not Christ, for the sake of that handful of poor people, first and directly, and for the rest of us afterwards, of course, secondarily and indirectly, so suppress all the natural emotions of these last moments as that their absolute absence is unique and singular, and points onwards to something more - viz., that this Man, who was susceptible of all human affections, and loved us with a love which is not merely high above our grasp, absolute, perfect, changeless, and Divine, but with a love like our own human affection, had also more than a man’s heart to give us, and gave us more, when, that He might comfort and sustain, He crushed down Himself and went to the Cross with words of tenderness and consolation and encouragement for others upon His lips. And if the prospect only sharpened and perfected, nor interrupted for one instant the flow of His love, the reality has no power to do aught else. In the glory, when He reached it, He poured out the same loving heart; and today He looks down upon us with the same face that bent over the table in the upper room, and the same tenderness flows to us. When John saw his Master next, after His ascension, amidst the glories of vision in his rocky Patmos, though His face was as the sun shineth in his strength, it was the old face. Though His hand bare the stars in a cluster, it was the hand that had been pierced with the nails. Though the breast was girded with the golden girdle of sovereignty and of priesthood, it was the breast on which John’s happy head had lain; and though the "Voice was as the sound of many waters," it soothed itself to a murmur, gentle as that with which the tide-less sea about Him rippled upon the silvery sand when He said, "Fear not ... I am the First and the Last." "Knowing that He goes to the Father He loves to the uttermost," and, being with the Father, He still so loves.

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