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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: September 10th

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THE POWER OF THE FLESH

Thus saith the Lord, Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm. - Jeremiah 17:5

The "flesh" is ever apt to make "sacraments" out of "ordinances" and to blend in disastrous union a faith in Jesus Christ and a faith in them. It cannot be done. It must be the one thing or the other. The reliance on the sacraments will in the long run kill the faith in Christ, or the faith in Christ drive out the reliance on the sacraments. Little as it may seem so at first, all experience has proved that Paul spoke with unerring instinct when he declared to the Galatians that if they yielded to the teaching of the Judaisers, and submitted to circumcision as necessary, they would get no good from Christ. He must be all or nothing. This was the earliest corruption of Christianity. It subsists perennially through the generations; it crops up ever and anon when we thought it was cut down. It is all about us in England to-day, devastating the Churches; and its roots are in each of us. Nothing but Christ’s Cross, and nothing as bringing the power of that Cross into my life but my simple faith - that is what Paul preached; and if he could have stood to-day, and seen men running after sacraments and ritual and outward forms and the aesthetics of worship, and turning the preacher of a Gospel into the priest of a sacrament, his voice would have rung out in as earnest and as surprised remonstrance: " Oh, foolish! who hath bewitched you?"

But we are all in danger from other fascinations and seducers, such as worldly cares, occupation, treasures. "As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone," said the negligent soldier, to account for the escape of the prisoner in his charge. That is exactly the history of the way in which a great many men’s Christianity trickles out of them without their knowing it. They are too busy to look after it, or even to notice its escape, and so drop, drop, drop, slow and unnoticed through the leak it slips, until there is none left; and the man fancies the vessel is full, till he comes to need to draw on it, and then! How many of us, I wonder, are like the elm trees that have sent their top roots down to a layer of innutritious earth, and are standing magnificent stems, but hollow inside, ready to be blown over in the first gale of wind?

Oh! how much Christian life is murdered every year! How much devotion dies in the air of the business street! How hard it is for you that have to go away every Monday morning, and keep at it all the week long, to keep up the fervour of your faith and the simplicity of your piety! Brother! there is only one way to do it, and that is to keep near to the Master, whose strength will hold you up. The attrition of worldly cares eats away the impression upon our hearts. As the soft south wind gradually eats away the inscriptions off the temples that may front it, so the writing upon our hearts is blurred by the constant, soft, moist breath of earth’s business and cares impinging upon it.

And the fascinations that slay most of us are all summed up in the solemn old words: " The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life." These bewitch you, before whose eyes Christ was set forth.

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