Daily Devotionals

Devotional: December 4th

THE POSSESSION OF THE SPIRIT OF MIGHT

That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, that ye may be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inward man. - Ephesians 3:16

It is a miserably inadequate conception of Christianity, and the gifts that it bestows, and the blessings that it intends for men, when it is limited, as it practically is, by a large number - I might almost say the majority - of professing Christians to a simple means of altering their relation to the past and to the broken law of God and of righteousness. Thanks be to His Name! His great gift to the world begins in each individual case with the assurance that all the past is canceled, and that He gives that great gift of forgiveness, which can never be too highly estimated unless it is forced out of its true place as the introduction, and made to be the climax and the end of His gifts. I do not know what Christianity means, unless it means that you and I are forgiven for a purpose; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit of God.

It is all well that we should enter into the vestibule: there is no other path unto the Throne but through the vestibule; but do not let us forget that the good news of forgiveness, though we need it day by day, and perpetually repeated, is but the introduction to, and porch of, the Temple, and that beyond it there towers, if I cannot say a loftier, yet I may say a further, gift, even the gift of a Divine life like His, from whom it comes, and of which it is in reality an effluence and a spark. The true characteristic gift of the Gospel is the gift of a new power to a sinful, weak world- a power which makes the feeble strong, and the strongest as an angel of God.

Oh! we who know how, "if any power we have, it is to ill"; we who understand the weakness, the unaptness, of our spirits to any good and their strength to every vagrant evil that comes upon them to tempt them, should surely recognise as a Gospel in very deed that which proclaims to us that the " everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth," who Himself "fainteth not, neither is weary," hath yet a loftier manifestation of His strength-giving power than that which is visible in the heavens above; where, "because He is strong in might, not one faileth." That Heaven, the region of calm completeness, of law unbroken, and therefore of power undiminished, affords a lesser and dimmer manifestation of His strength than the work that is done in the hell of a human heart that has wandered and is brought back, that is stricken with the weakness of the fever of sin, and is drawn again into the strength of obedience and the omnipotence of dependence. It is much to say, "For that He is strong in might, not one of these faileth"; it is more to say, " He giveth power to them that have failed; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength." The Gospel is the gift of pardon for holiness, and its inmost and most characteristic bestowment is the bestowment of a new power for obedience and service.

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