Daily Devotionals
Devotional: February 16th
A GLORIOUS EFFORT
I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. - 1 Corinthians 2:2
We cannot keep the great sight of Christ’s Cross before the eye of our minds without effort. You will have very resolutely to look away from something else, if, amid all the dazzling gauds of earth, we are to look over them all to the far-off luster of that heavenly love. Just as timorous people in a thunderstorm will light a candle that they may not see the lightning, so many Christians have their hearts filled with the twinkling light of some miserable tapers of earthly care and pursuits, which, though they be dim and smoky, are bright enough to make it hard to see the silent depths of heaven, though it blaze with a myriad stars. If you hold a sixpence close enough up to the pupil of your eye, it will keep you from seeing the sun; and if you hold the world close to mind and heart, as many of you do, you will only see, round the rim of it, the least tiny ring of the overlapping love of God. What the world lets you see you will see, and the world will take care that it will let you see very little - not enough to do you any good, not enough to deliver you from its chains. Wrench yourself away, my brother, from the absorbing contemplation of Birmingham jewelery and paste, and look at the true riches. If you have ever had some glimpses of that wondrous love, and ever been drawn by it to cry, Abba, Father! Do not let the trifles which belong not to your true inheritance fill your thoughts, but renew the vision, and by determined turning away of your eyes from beholding vanity, look away from the things that are seen, that you may gaze upon the things that are not seen, and chiefest among them, on the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If you have never looked on that love, I beseech you now to turn aside and see this great sight. Do not let that brightness burn unnoticed while your eyes are fixed on the ground like men absorbed in gold-digging, while a glorious sunshine is flushing the eastern sky. Look to the unspeakable, incomparable, immeasurable love of God, in giving up His Son to death for us all. Look and be saved. Look and live. Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on you, and, beholding, you will become the sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty.
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