Beloved, are you ministering to Christ? Are you doing it with your hands?
Are you doing it with your substance and with what you have? Is He getting the best of what is most real to you? Has He a place at your table? And when He does not come to fill the chair, is it free to His representative, His poor and humble children? Your words and wishes are cheap if they do not find expression in your actual gifts. Even Mary did not put Him off with the incense of her heart, but laid her costliest gifts at His feet.
Ye busy women, who work so hard to dress your children and furnish your houses and tables, what have your hands earned for the Master, what have you done or sacrificed for Jesus? "Can you afford it?" was asked of a n.o.ble woman, as she promised a costly offering for the Master"s work.
"No," was her n.o.ble reply, "but I can sacrifice it." Let us to-day look around us and see, what we do and give more to the loving Saviour, who gave up His whole life for us.
JULY 23.
"Bring them hither to Me" (Matt. xiv. 18).
Why have ye not received all the fulness of the Holy Spirit? And how may we be anointed with "the rest of the oil?" The greatest need is to make room when G.o.d makes it. Look around you at your situation. Are you not encompa.s.sed with needs at this very moment, and almost overwhelmed with difficulties, trials and emergencies? These are all divinely provided vessels for the Holy Spirit to fill, and if you would but rightly understand their meaning, they would become opportunities for receiving new blessings and deliverances which you can get in no other way.
Bring these vessels to G.o.d. Hold them steadily before Him in faith and prayer. Keep still, and stop your own restless working until He begins to work. Do nothing that He does not Himself command you to do. Give Him a chance to work, and He will surely do so, and the very trials that threatened to overcome you with discouragement and disaster, will become G.o.d"s opportunity for the revelation of His grace and glory in your life, as you have never known Him before. "Bring them (all needs) to Me."
JULY 24.
"The righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us" (Rom. vii. 4).
In our earlier experiences we know the Holy Ghost only at a distance, in things that happen in a providential direction, or in the Word alone, but after awhile we receive Him as an inward Guest, and He dwells in our very midst, and He speaks to us in the innermost chambers of our being. But then the external working of His power does not cease, but it only increases, and seems the more glorious. The Power that dwells within us works without us, answering prayer, healing sickness, overruling providences, "Doing exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the Power that worketh in us."
There is a double presence of the Lord for the consecrated believer. He is present in the heart, and is mightily present in the events of life. He is the Christ in us, the Christ of all the days, with all power in heaven and earth.
And so the Holy Ghost is our wonder-worker, our all sufficient G.o.d and Guardian, and He is waiting in these days to work as mightily in the affairs of men as in the days of Moses, of Daniel and of Paul.
JULY 25.
"He that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to G.o.d" (Rom. xiv.
18).
G.o.d can only use us while we are right. Satan cared far less for Peter"s denial of his Master than for the use he made of it afterwards to destroy his faith. So Jesus said to him: "I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not." It was Peter"s faith he attacked, and so it is our faith that Satan contests. "The trial of our faith is much more precious than gold that perisheth."
Whatever else we let go let us hold steadfastly to our trust. "Cast not away, therefore, your confidence," and "hold fast the rejoicing of our hope firm unto the end." And if you would hold your trust, hold your sweetness, your rightness of spirit, your obedience to Christ, your victory in every way.
Whatever comes, regard it as of less consequence, than that you should triumph and stand fast, and accepting every circ.u.mstance as G.o.d is pleased to let occur, wave the banner of your victory in the face of every foe, and go on, shouting in His name, "Thanks be unto G.o.d that always causeth us to triumph in Christ Jesus."
JULY 26.
"Now mine eye seeth Thee" (Job xlii. 5).
We must recognize the true character of our self-life and its real virulence and vileness. We must consent to its destruction, and we must take it ourselves, as Abraham did Isaac, and lay it at the feet of G.o.d in willing sacrifice.
This is a hard work for the natural heart, but the moment the will is yielded and the choice is made, that death is past, the agony is over, and we are astonished to find that the death is accomplished.
Usually the crisis of life in such cases hangs upon a single point. G.o.d does not need to strike us in a hundred places to inflict a death wound.
There is one point that touches the heart, and that is the point G.o.d usually strikes, the dearest thing in our life, the decisive thing in our plans, the citadel of the will, the center of the heart, and when we yield there, there is little left to yield anywhere else, and when we refuse to yield at this point, a spirit of evasion and compromise enters into all the rest of our life. Lord, we take Thee to enable us to will Thy will to be done in all things in our life without and within.
JULY 27.
"The building up of the body of Christ" (R. V., Eph. iv. 13).
G.o.d is preparing His heroes, and when the opportunity comes He can fit them into their place in a moment and the world will wonder where they came from. Let the Holy Ghost prepare you, dear friend, by all the discipline of life; and when the last finishing touch has been given to the marble, it will be easy for G.o.d to put it on the pedestal, and fit it into its niche.
There is a day coming, when, like Othniel, we, too, shall judge the nations, and rule and reign with Christ on the millennial earth; but ere that glorious day can be, we must let G.o.d prepare us as He did Othniel at Kirjethsepher, amid the trials of our present life, and in the little victories, the significance of which, perhaps, we little dream. At least, let us be sure of this, that if the Holy Ghost has got an Othniel ready, the Lord of heaven and earth has a throne prepared for him.
Is it for me to be used by His grace, Helping His kingdom to bring, Is it for me to inherit a place, E"en on the throne of my King?
JULY 28.
"Not my will, but Thine" (Luke xxii. 42).
He who once suffered in Gethsemane will be our strength and our victory, too. We may fear, we may also sink, but let us not be dismayed, and we shall yet praise Him, and look back from a finished course, and say, "Not one word hath failed of all that the Lord hath spoken."
But in order to do this, we must, like Him, meet the conflict, not with a defiant, but with a submissive spirit. He had to say, "Not My will, but Thine be done"; but in saying it, He gained the very thing He surrendered.
So the submission of Gethsemane is not a blind and dead submission of a heart that abandons all its hope; but it is the free submission that bows the head, in order to get double strength through the faith and prayer.
We let go, in order that we may take a firmer hold. We give up, in order that we may more fully receive. We lay our Isaac on Mount Moriah, and we ask him back, no longer our Isaac, but G.o.d"s Isaac, and infinitely more secure, because given back in the resurrection life.