Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 6th

THE DIVINE INDWELLER

He abideth with you, and shall be in you. - John 14:17

The Divine strength has its seat in, and is intended to influence the whole of, the inner life. "Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man." That, I suppose, does not mean the new creation through faith in Jesus Christ - what the Apostle calls "the new man" - but it means simply what another Apostle calls "the hidden man of the heart," and only refers to the distinction which we all draw between the outward, visible, material frame, and the unseen self that animates and informs it. It is this inner self, then, in which the Spirit of God is to dwell, and into which it is to breathe strength. The leaven is hid deep in three measures of meal until the whole be leavened.

And the point to mark is, that the whole inward region which makes up the true man is the field upon which this Divine Spirit is to work. It is not a bit of your inward life that is to be hallowed; it is not any one aspect of it that is to be strengthened, - but it is the whole intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, combination, memory, will. The whole inner man in all its corners is to be filled, and to come under the influence of this power, " until there be no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle giveth thee light."

So for this Divine Indweller there is no part of my life that is not patent to His tread. There are no rooms of the house of my spirit into which He is not to go. Let Him come with the master-key in His hand into all the dim chambers of your feeble nature; and as life is light in the eye, and colour in the cheek, and deftness in the fingers, and strength in the arm, and pulsation in the heart, so He will come and strengthen your understandings, and make you able for loftier tasks of intellect and of reason, than you can face in your unaided strength; and He will dwell in your affections, and make them vigorous to lay hold upon the holy things that are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that " their reach shall not be beyond their grasp," as, alas! it so often is in the sadness and disappointments of human loves. And He will come into that feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by that; He will lift your will, and make it fix upon the good and abominate the evil, and through the whole being He will pour a great tide of strength which shall cover all the weakness. He will be like some subtle elixir which, taken into the lips, steals through a pallid and wasted frame, and brings back a glow to the cheek and a lustre to the eye and a swiftness to the brain, and power to the whole nature. Or as some plant, drooping and flagging beneath the hot rays of the sun, when it has the scent of water given to it, will, in all its parts, stiffen and erect itself, so this Divine Spirit will go searching every corner of the inner man, illuminating and invigorating all.