Daily Devotionals

Devotional: August 24th

PROGRESSIVE BRIGHTNESS

The path of the righteous is as the shining light (the light of dawn, marg.), that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. - Proverbs 4:18

This is what a Christian life ought to be. The light of the Christian life, like its type in the heavens, may be analyzed into three beams: purity, knowledge, blessedness; and these three, blended together, make the pure whiteness of a Christian soul. Every Christian life should be a life of increasing lustre, uninterrupted, and the natural result of increasing communion with, and conformity to, the very fountain itself of heavenly radiance. Progress is laid down emphatically in Scripture as the mark of a religious life. In many ways Scripture lays it down as a rule that life in the highest region, like life in the lowest, is marked by continual growth. It is so in regard of all other things. Continuity in any kind of practice gives increasing power in the art. The artisan, the blacksmith with his hammer, the skilled artificer at his trade, the student at his subject, the good man in his course of life, and the bad man in his, do equally show that use becomes second nature. And so let me say what incalculable importance there is in our getting habit, with all its mystical power to mould life, on to the side of righteousness, and of becoming accustomed to do good, and so being unfamiliar with evil.

This intention of continuous growth is marked by the gifts that are bestowed upon us in Jesus Christ. He gives us - and it is by no means the least of the gifts that He bestows - an absolutely unattainable aim as the object of our efforts. For He bids us not only be perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect, but He bids us be entirely conformed to His own Self. The misery of men is that they pursue aims so narrow and so shabby that they can be attained, and are therefore left behind, to sink hull down on the backward horizon. But to have before us an aim which is absolutely unreachable, instead of being, as ignorant people say, an occasion of despair and of idleness, is, on the contrary, the very salt of life. It keeps us young, it makes hope immortal, it emancipates from lower pursuits, it diminishes the weight of sorrows, it administers an anesthetic to every pain. If you want to keep life fresh, seek for that which you can never fully find.

Christ gives us infinite powers to reach that unattainable aim, for He gives us access to all His own fulness, and there is more in His storehouses than we can ever take, not to say more than we can ever hope to exhaust. And therefore, because of the aim that is set before us, and because of the powers that are bestowed upon us to reach it, there is stamped upon every Christian life unmistakably, as God’s purpose and ideal concerning it, that it should for ever and for ever be growing nearer and nearer, as some ascending spiral that ever circles closer and closer, and yet never absolutely unites with the great central Perfection which is Himself. So for every one of us, if we are Christian people at all, " this is the will of God, even your perfection."

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