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Music For the Soul
Devotional: December 11th

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THE IMPERFECT PRESENT

Now we see in a mirror darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I have been known. - 1 Corinthians 13:12

The facts of Christian experience are such as that they inevitably point to the conclusion that there is a life beyond. All that is good and blessed about religion, our faith, the joy that comes from our faith, the sweetness of communion, the aspiration after the increase of fellowship with Him, - all these, to the man that enjoys them, are the best proof that they are going to last for ever, and that death can have no power over them. " Like thoughts, their very sweetness yieldeth proof that they are born for immortality."

To love, to know, to reach the hands out through the shows of time and sense, and to grasp an unseen reality that lies away beyond, is, to any man that has ever experienced the emotion and done the thing, one of the strongest of all demonstrations that nothing belonging to this dusty low region of the physical can touch that immortal aspiration that knits him to God; but that whatsoever may befall the husk and shell of him, his faith, his love, his obedience, his consecration, these at least are eternal, and may laugh at death and the grave. And I believe that ever to the men that have not the experience, the fact of religious emotion, the fact of worship, ought to be one of the best demonstrations of a future life.

The very incompleteness of our possession of God and of God’s possession of us points onwards to, and, as it seems to me, demands, a future. The imperfection, as well as the present attainments of our Christian experience, proclaim a coming time. That we are no better than we are, being as good as we are, seems to make it inconceivable that this evidently half-done job is going to be broken oft’ short at the side of the grave.

Here is a certain force at work in a man’s nature, the power of God’s good Spirit, evidently capable of producing effects of entire transformation. Such being the case, who, looking at the effects, can doubt that sometime and somewhere there will be less disproportion between the two? The engine is evidently not working full power. The characters of Christians at the best are so inconsistent and contradictory that they are evidently only in the making. It is clear that we are looking at unfinished work; and surely the great Master Builder who has laid such a foundation-stone, tried and precious, will not begin to build and not be able to finish! Every Christian life, at its best and noblest, shows, as it were, the ground plan of a great structure partly carried out - a bit of walling up here, vacancy there, girders spanning wide spaces, but gaping for a roof, a chaos and a confusion. It may look a thing of shreds and patches, and they that pass by the way begin to mock. But the very fact that it is incomplete prophesies, to wise men, of the day when the headstone shall be brought with shouting, and the flag hoisted on the roof-tree. Fools and children, says the proverb, should not see half-done work- certainly they should not judge it.

Wait a bit. There comes a time when tendencies shall be facts, and when influences shall have produced their appropriate effects, and when all that is partial and broken shall be consummate and entire in the kingdom that is beyond the stars.

Wait! and be sure that the good and the bad, so strangely blended in Christian experience, are alike charged with the prophecy of a glorious and perfect future.

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