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Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 9th

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THE INDWELLING CHRIST

That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith. - Ephesians 3:17

There must be an indwelling Christ in order to have an experience, deep and stable, of His love. Then we shall know the love which we thus experience. But how comes that indwelling? That is the question for us. The knowledge of His love is blessedness, is peace, is love, is everything. That knowledge arises from our fellowship with, and our possession of, the love of God which is in Jesus Christ. How does that fellowship with, and possession of, the love of God in Jesus Christ come? That is the all-important question. What is the beginning of everything? "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." There is the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come if we are to come at all into the possession and perception of Christ’s great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all, there must be the knowledge which is the mere work of the understanding, bringing to us the facts of Christ’s life and death for us. This we have to take with the hand of our simple understanding. And then you must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough to know the love that God has to us in that lower sense of the word "knowledge." Many of you know that who never got any blessing out of it all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the "knowing,"’ there must be the "believing" of the love. You must translate the notion into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must not be contented with knowing, you must trust.

And if you have done that, all the rest will follow; and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble, self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees, leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple palace - a large place in which Christ’s love is imparted to us all.

When the sunbeams fall upon a mirror, it flashes in the light, because they do not enter its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary is the case with the sentient mirrors of our spirits. In them the light must first sink in before it can ray out. They must be filled with the glory before the glory can stream forth. They are not so much like a reflecting surface as like a bar of iron which needs to be heated right down to its obstinate black core before its outer skin glow with the whiteness of a heat that is too hot to sparkle. The sunshine must fall on us, not as it does on some lonely hill-side, lighting up the grey stones with a passing gleam that changes nothing, and fades away, leaving the solitude to its sadness; but as it does on some cloud cradled near its setting, which it drenches and saturates with fire till its cold heart burns, and all its wreaths of vapor are brightness palpable, glorified by the light which lives amidst its mists. So must we have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us.

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