Daily Devotionals

Devotional: April 18th

A BREVIARY OF CHRISTIAN GRACES

Add on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue, and in your virtue knowledge and in your knowledge temperance, and in your temperance patience, and in your patience godliness, and in your godliness love of the brethren, and in your love of the brethren love. - 2 Peter 1:5-7

All the excellencies which precede godliness are of the sterner, the more severe, and self-regarding kind, and those which follow it are of the gentler sort, and refer to others. Before it stand strength, discrimination, self-control, patience, all having reference to myself alone, and mainly to the difficulties and antagonisms which I meet with in life. There follow it "brotherly kindness and charity"; having reference to others, and being gentle and sweet. If I might so say, it is as in some Alpine range, where the side that faces the north presents rugged cliffs and sparse vegetation, and close-knit strength to breast the tempest, and to live amidst the snows; whilst the southern side has gentler slopes, and a more fertile soil, a richer vegetation, and a sunnier sky. So here: on the one side you get these severe and self-regarding graces, fronting a world full of antagonism and evil; and on the other side you get the gentler graces, fronting a world full of men that need care and help; whilst above them all towers the great summit that points to the stars, and lives up amongst the blue, from which flow down on the one side the streams of love and pity, and on the other run down the cliffs that front the stormy north. In the beginning faith; at the end love; in the centre godliness; which will blend into one harmonious whole the virtues of strength and of gentleness, even as the type and example of both are found in the Christ of whom long ago it was said: "He shall come with a strong hand; . . . and shall carry the lambs in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young."

And in like manner, the great difficult problem of how far I am to carry my own cultivation of Christian excellence apart from regard to others, and how far I am to let my obligations to help and succor others overcome the necessity for individual cultivation of Christian character; that difficulty which presses practically upon some of us with great force is best solved as Peter solves it here. Put godliness in the middle, let that be the centre, and from it will flow on the one side all needful self-discipline and tutoring, and on the other all wise and Christlike regard to the needs and the sorrows of the men around us.

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