Daily Devotionals

Devotional: May 17th

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the Gospel of Christ. - Philippians 1:27

LET no man say that such an injunction is vague or hopeless. You must have a perfect ideal if you are to live at all by an ideal. There cannot be any flaws in your pattern if the pattern is to be of any use. You aim at the stars, and if you do not hit them you may progressively approach them. We need absolute perfection to strain after, and one day - blessed be His Name! - we shall attain it. Try to walk worthy of God, and you will find out how tight that precept grips, and how close it fits.

The love and the righteousness which are to become the law of our lives are revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Whatever may sound impracticable in the injunction to imitate God assumes a more homely and possible shape when it becomes an injunction to follow Jesus. And just as that form of the precept tends to make the law of conformity to the Divine nature more blessed and less hopelessly above us, so it makes the law of conformity to some mere ideal of goodness less cold and unsympathetic. It makes all the difference to our joyfulness and freedom whether we are trying to obey a law of duty, seen only too clearly to be binding, but also above our reach, or whether we have the law in a living Person whom we have learned to love. In the one case there stands upon a pedestal above us a cold perfection, white, complete, marble; in the other case there stands beside us a living law in pattern, a Brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, whose hand we can grasp, whose heart we can trust, and of whose help we can be sure. To say to me, " Follow the ideal of perfect righteousness," is to relegate me to a dreary, endless struggling; to say to me, "Follow your Brother, and be like your Father," is to bring warmth and hope and liberty into all my effort. The word that says, "Walk worthy of God," is a royal law, the perfect law of perfect freedom.

When we say, " Walk worthy of God," we mean two things - one, "Do after His example," and the other, "Render back to Him what He deserves for what He has done to you." And so this law bids us measure, by the side of that great love that died on the Cross for us all, our poor, imperfect returns of gratitude and of service. He has lavished all His treasure on you; what have you brought Him back? He has given you the whole wealth of His tender pity, of His forgiving mercy, of His infinite goodness. Do you adequately repay such lavish love? Has He not " sown much and reaped little " in your heart? Has He not poured out the fulness of His affection, and have we not answered Him with a few grudging drops squeezed from our hearts?

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