May 1927
324
T h e
K i n g ’ s
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D a ily M ed ita tion s for the Year B y W i l f r e d M. H o p k i n s !Tiq?i?^irpgiijff^^q?^^t?^'?'?q?'J'J^^^q?i?q7q?q?'?q?ia5g5a5g5Z5a5a5B5a5g5g5a55SE5a5a5a5g5gH5aSH5H5a5a5BSg5g5g5g5H5a5Z5E5BSE5S5E5E5H5H5E5HS5SH5iSg5g5H5£!j M ay 7. “Ye are the light of the world." — Matt. 5:14. ELSEWHERE Christ says: “I am the light of the world
nor need we wish it, for they are but the servants, we are the sons- and daughters of the Most High. But we omit our duty and lose more than half our privileges if we are not His messengers. He has put a word into our mouth and we are to go and tell it out to all mankind—the message of His Fatherhood, and of sal vation and peace, through Jesus Christ,; for “every one that believeth.” We should remember, however, that the angelic office demands purity,’devotion, obedience. If we aspire ,to it, we must ourselves be cleansed from the guilt of sin, and we must strive to do His will “as angels do in heaven.” There is no self-will, no hesitation, no self-seeking amid the ministers in the upper courts. They never say: “God’s*will must be done” with a groan and a grimace, as though it were a burden which they would fain escape. They fly upon eager wings of love to fulfil His pur poses; they delight to do His will. So, as “angels of God,” let us go forth to. the task which He has appointed us; we shall find His service our reward, His smile our heaven. IT mattered nothing to them that the poor man had been healed of his malady, that the devils had been driven out, that a crying public nuisance had been removed. They were imper vious to the glory of the Christ; they were insensible to all the blessings which His presence might confer. They had lost their swine'?) their business had been affected; their hopes of gain had perished—that sort of thing was not to be tolerated—so they besought Him to depart. Could there be a more striking testi mony to the deadening and degrading power of materialism on the hearts of men? Let us beware lest it exercise its baneful influence over us. There is a tendency in every man to desire Christ’s departure if the Divine presence interferes with his profit, his pleasure, or his ease. Nothing can be more dangerous than sueh an attitude of mind; for He will not stay where He is not desired. He left the country of the Gadarenes, at their request, and we do not read that He ever returned. To put material things before spiritual; to object to revivals because they interfere with our business, our prejudices, or our comfort, is to ask Christ to depart. Alas for us if He grants our unholy desire, and leaves us, never to return! Such a tragedy is, at least, possible. THIS is a very different request from that of the Gadarenes. (See May 10). The one was due to materialistic insensibility; the other is the outcome of keen spiritual susceptibility. World liness blinded the Gadarenes to their need of Christ; Peter felt the depth of his demerit. This latter state of mind is very common to those who have been vouchsafed real spiritual vision. The glory, the beauty, the majesty, and, above all, the purity of God, makes them loathe their own degradation and shrink from the presence of the Divine. They are blinded with excess of light; they cannot bear the contrast between themselves and the heavenly Visitant; they fear lest they should be consumed by the celestial Fire. This condition of soul is almost infinitely higher than that of the Gadarenes ; but there is a loftier still. M ay 10. ‘.‘They began to pray him to depart."—Mark 5:17. M ay 11. “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man."—Luke 5:8.
is there a contradiction.here? Not any more than there would be to declare that the sun, or the moon, was the light of the world: both are true, though in a different fashion aqd in a different degree. The sun shines of himself, the moon shines by reflected light; the sun illuminates when it is above the horizon; the moon only when he is absent. Christ is the great “Sun of Righteous ness” but now that He is no longer upon earth we are to be moons, shining in the darkness with a glory which reproduces His. That is our destiny, but to fulfil it we must .be filled with the indwelling Christ; for we do not shine with reflected light but, like a lantern, by a radiance from within. If. He dwell not richly in our hearts by faith, the light 'which is in us will be darkness, for we have no glory of our own. This light is not to be flashed in men’s eyes; it is to glow with a steady beauty “before men” until, arrested by the persistent radiance, they seek at length to know its source and are led to “glorify our Father who is in heaven.” It is a great privilege thus to be “Christo phers,” lightbearers to men who are lost in the darkness of “sin and nature’s night,” or to those upon whose souls the shadows of bereavement or sorrow have fallen. Let us pray that the lense may ever be clear and clearly •S'&. . I a s M ay 8. “Whosoever is born of God . . . cannot sin."—1 John 3:9. IT does not say: “He that is born of God,” or we might have thought that it referred only to Christ, but: “Whosoever is born of God . . . . cannot sin.” And yet the doctrine of Christian Perfection has not only been proved by experience to be false, but its results have usually been disastrous to those who pro fessed it. What, then, is the solution of the mystery? Simply that ‘every Christian upon earth is two men in one. There is the “old man,” who never altogether ceases to sin—the man born of the flesh; and there is the “new man,” born of the Spirit, who never sins, and who never fails to protest, with more or less vigor, against the sin of that “body of death” in which he is imprisoned. “By their fruits ye shall know them:” yes, but by which fruits? for the same men sometimes bring forth good, and sometimes evil fruit. The same truth is apparent here, under a figure of speech. The Christian is two trees—there is the old stock, which still brings forth evil fruit; and the grafted tree, which bears only good fruit. Christianity is not a decora tion, it is a regeneration, but the old man, the old tree, is not destroyed by it; it remains until, by death, we are for ever set free from the bondage of the flesh.
M ay 9. “An angel of God."—1 Sam. 29:9.
“I WANT to be an angel;” so we used to sing in our child hood days. And so we may be, and so we ought to be; for an “angel” signifies a “messenger,” and to be God’s messenger is at once the destiny and the glory of human life. “Angels,” in the common acceptation of the term, we are not, and can never be;
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