Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 15th

ALL TRUTH BASED UPON CHRISTIANITY

Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning. - James 1:17

There never was, and there is not, any religion untouched by Christianity that has any firm grip of that truth, "God is Love." There have been all kinds of deities in the world, outside the limits of the circle in which the influence of the Gospel has been felt. You have had cruel, capricious, good-natured, savage, vicious, revengeful, and impure deities. You have had the deification of lust and passion and favouritism and caprice, as well as of lofty and pure things; but there is no God of Love anywhere that ever I heard of, except where some faint rays of Christianity and its blessed message have come. And the people that now-a-days are kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed, and, in the name of this conviction which they owe to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, are turning round and rejecting that Gospel, are committing intellectual suicide, and strike away the very basis upon which the truth that they value so much rests. The fact remains that men have never been able to raise themselves up to, and maintain themselves at, the lofty level of the lofty belief that God is Love, when they have turned their backs on the Cross of Jesus Christ. Let history answer if they have!

I believe that the course of thought in cultivated Europe is coming to this plain alternative, - that a mere bare theism cannot keep its hold, and that the choice is between Christ and His Cross on the one hand, and blank disbelief in the love of God, and in God at all, on the other. These two will divide the field. There will either be a happy, calm, triumphant hold of God’s love manifest in Jesus Christ, or there will be a despairing sense that we walk in darkness as orphan creatures here, knowing not whether we have a Father and a home.

Oh, dear brother! our own conscience may tell us, and the world’s history may tell us, and men-made religions may tell us, that it is not an easy thing for a man to say, nor to believe in his heart, that God is Love.

And when God’s love is proved, it needs to be pressed upon us; does it not? How we all forget it, and turn away from it, are careless about it; oppose ice to His flame, selfishness to His love, indifference to His pleadings! Do not you, dear brother? Do we not need something that shall touch our hearts, and shall press upon us, as well as prove to us, the endless love of our Father God? I think we do.