Maundy Thursday
Click to donate today!
Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
UNION WITH GOD
Whoso hearkeneth unto Me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil. - Proverbs 1:33
The God whom men know, or think they know, outside of the revelation of Divinity in Jesus Christ, is a God before whom they sometimes tremble, who is far more often their terror than their love, who is their "ghastliest doubt" still more frequently than He is their dearest faith. But the God that is in Christ wooes and wins men to Him, and from His great sweetness there streams out, as it were, a magnetic influence that draws hearts to Him. He has made "the rough places plain and the crooked things straight "; leveled the mountains and raised the valleys, and cast up across all the wilderness of the world a highway along which "the wayfaring man, though a fool," may travel. Narrow understandings may know, and selfish hearts may love, and low-pitched confessions may reach the ear of, the God who comes near to us in Christ, that we in Christ may come near to Him. The breaker is gone up before us. " Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest of all ... by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, . . . let us draw near with true hearts."
One of the blessings that come to the dweller in God’s house, and not a small one, is that, by the power of this one satisfied longing, driven like an iron rod through all the tortuosities of my life, there will come into it a unity which otherwise few lives are ever able to attain, and the want of which is no small cause of the misery that is great upon men. Most of us seem, to our own consciousness, to live amidst endless distractions all our days, and our lives to be a heap of links parted from each other rather than a chain. But if we have that one constant thought with us, and if we are, through all the variety of occupations, true to the one purpose of serving and keeping near God, then we have a charm against the frittering away of our lives in distractions, and the misery of multiplicity, and we enter into the blessedness of unity and singleness of purpose; and our lives become, like the starry heavens in all the variety of their motions, obedient to one impulse. For unity in a life does not depend upon the monotony of its tasks, but upon the simplicity of the motive which impels to all varieties of work. So it is possible for a man harassed by multitudinous avocations, and drawn hither and thither by sometimes apparently conflicting and always bewildering, rapidly-following duties, to say, "This one thing I do," if all his doings are equally acts of obedience to God.
'Music For The Soul' daily readings for a year from the writings of the Rev. Alexander Maclaren, D.D., selected and arranged by the Rev. Geo. Coates, published by A.C. Armstrong and Son, 51 East Tenth Street, (1897). The original text is in the Public Domain and this electronic version is free for anyone without cost or obligation. This a year long daily devotional was written by the Rev. Alexander Maclaren over 100 years ago. This Scottish pastor had a heart to follow Jesus and a love for souls.