Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 30th

OUR UNREVEALED FUTURE

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward. - Romans 8:18

The fact of sonship makes us quite sure of the future. I am not concerned to appraise the relative value of the various arguments and proofs, or, it may be, presumptions, which may recommend the doctrine of a future life to men, but it seems to me that the strongest reasons for believing in another world are these two: first, that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and has gone up there; and, second, that a man here can pray and trust and love God, and feel that he is His child. We are the children of God now, and if we are children now, we shall be grown up some time. Childhood leads to maturity. The infant becomes a man.

That is to say, he that here, in an infantile way, is stammering with his poor unskilled lips the name "Abba! Father! " will one day come to speak it fully. He that dimly trusts, he that partially loves, he that can lift up his heart in some more or less unworthy prayer and aspiration after God, in all these emotions and exercises, has the great proof in himself that such emotions, such relationship, can never be put an end to. The roots have gone down through the temporal, and have laid hold of the eternal. Anything seems to me to be more credible than that a man who can look up and say, " My Father! " shall be crushed by what befalls the mere outside of him; anything seems to me to be more believable than to suppose that the nature which is capable of these elevating emotions and aspirations of confidence and hope, which can know God and yearn after Him, and can love Him, is going to be wiped out like a microscopic insect by the finger of Death. The material has nothing to do with these feelings, and if I know myself, in however feeble and imperfect a degree, to be the son of God, I carry in the conviction the very pledge and seal of immortality, "That is a thought whose very sweetness yieldeth proof that it was born for immortality." "We are the sons of God," therefore we shall always be so, in all worlds, and whatsoever may become of this poor wrappage in which my soul dwells.

The consciousness of belonging to another order of things, because I am God’s child, will make me sure that when I have done with earth, the tie that binds me to my Father will not be broken, but that I shall go home, where I shall be fully and for ever all that I so imperfectly began to be here, where all gaps in my character shall be filled up, and the half-completed circle of my heavenly perfectness shall grow like the crescent moon into full-orbed beauty.