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Music For the Soul
Devotional: September 9th

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THE FASCINATING INFLUENCES OF THE WORLD

O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified? - Galatians 3:1

What glittering eye is it, envious and covetous, that has "overlooked " you, as they say about infants unaccountably wasting, and so made you to wither away?

Let us understand clearly about this matter, that whatever blame may be laid at the door of external causes, and of what we may call fascinations, what gives them all their power is our own weakness and folly. It it all very well to analyse the causes of religious declension, and to try and guard ourselves against them, but that is leading men upon a false quest, unless we remind ourselves at the beginning that the real cause lies within. No outward temptation, nothing in earth, hell, or heaven, has any power to turn away my eyes from Jesus Christ unless I choose to give it the power. I am not to put the blame of my feeble Christian life, or of my utter irreligion upon anything or anybody, but only myself. If I had not combustibles in my heart, it would do me no harm to put ever so fierce a light to it. But if I carry about a keg of gunpowder within me, I am not to blame the match if there comes an explosion. It is because our hearts do not find in Jesus Christ all that they crave that we are unfaithful and turn away from Him; and it is because our hearts are foolish and bad that they do not find in Jesus Christ all that they crave. If you and I were as we should be, there would not be a desire in us that would not be met in our loving Lord, in His sweetness and grace. And if there were not a desire in us that was not met in our loving Lord’s sweetness and grace, then all these temptations might play upon us innocuously, and we should walk through the fire and not be harmed. So let us take it all to ourselves, and remember that whatever temptations may be brought to bear upon us, we, we alone, are responsible for the effects that they produce.

Who, then, are the fascinators? I am not going to deal at all with the immediate occasion of these words, which referred to the Galatians falling away from the doctrinal Christianity preached by Paul; but I will just remind you in passing that the thing which caused all this vehemence of argument and expostulation on the part of the Apostle was that the Galatian Christians had listened to teachers who did not deny salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, but who sought to make an outward rite necessary, side by side with faith. It makes no difference to the principle involved that the rite which the Judaising teachers tried to force on the Gentiles who believed was circumcision, and that the rites which the modern Judaisers make essential are Baptism and Lord’s Supper. The principle is identical; and wherever you get an attempt to mix up these two things, salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and salvation through sacraments, the sledge-hammer blows of this Epistle to the Galatians come down upon the unnatural amalgam and smite it to pieces. It is hard for men to keep up on the level of the New Testament and of its spiritual conceptions of worship. It is hard to use ordinances and rites as merely material aids to spiritual apprehension and affection. It is hard to keep them in their due place of subordination.

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