Our Father does not want us to take an affliction lightly. “A reproof enters more into a wise man than a hundred stripes into a fool” (Prov 17:10). But the more you take it to heart the more you gain in holiness; that, so to speak, is the goal.
The Father’s discipline is intended to effect the greatest gain that could possibly be acquired—even to be “partakers of His holiness” (Heb 12:10). This is the only time this phrase is used. The mere thought of partaking of the separateness in which He is, is a great delight and encouragement to the heart. It has very great practical effects.
When any of us have in any degree partaken of His holiness, we become correspondingly sensitive to everything contrary to or inconsistent with it. It is the superior thing which even enables us to refuse the inferior, and this in a wonderful way works all round. It is not that we feel that we are doing anything, but we shrink from the moral atmosphere here, and like to be encased in the armor of light—“hidden with Christ is God” (Col 3:3).
The process is a very interesting one; your divine taste is so advanced that the incongruities in everything here are not only apparent, but their real worthlessness is disclosed. You do not feel that you that you are losing (though you are losing the things here) because you are so assured of the highest and greatest gain.
Three great divine facts or events have occurred, and our faithfulness is provided as we are affected by
them. The first is that Christ has come, has died for our sins and risen. The second is that He has gone to heaven. The third is that the Holy Spirit has come down to be with us and in us. Then there actually is a fourth which is our prospect, even that He is coming to receive us unto Himself in glory.
Now every believer knows something of the first—no salvation otherwise; the second and third test our faithfulness. The Lord Jesus is in heaven. Do we “seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (Col 3:1)? The Holy Spirit is with us and in us: does He lead and control our hearts absolutely in this scene in the absence of our Lord?
All knowledge of truth is ineffectual when we are not in correspondence with these great unconditional facts, which remain true even when we are not true to them. But when we are, all the truth is in its place in our hearts. You are of special interest to the Lord Jesus. May He fulfill all His good pleasure concerning you, and fit you for His blessed service in a scene where there can be nothing right, because He has been rejected here.
—J B Stoney (1814-1897)
MJS daily online devotional excerpt for April 29
My life is not only in His hands, but He is my very life. “For by Him were all things created . . . and by Him all things consist” (Col. 1:16, 17). He controls and maintains the universe, and we can surely depend upon Him to care for us who share His life.
“We are all of us prone to forget the weighty fact that ‘God trieth the righteous.’ ‘He withdraweth not His eyes from the righteous’ (Ps. 11:5; Job 36:7). We are in His hands, and under His eye continually. We are the objects of His deep, tender, and unchanging love; but we are also the subjects of His wise moral government. His dealings with us are varied. They are sometimes preventive; sometimes corrective; always instructive.
“We may be bent on some course of our own, the end of which would be moral ruin. He intervenes and withdraws us from our purpose. He dashes to fragments our air-castles, dissipates our golden dreams, and interrupts many a darling scheme on which our hearts were bent, and which would have proved to be certain destruction. ‘Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man, to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living’ (Job 33:29, 30).”
Charles Henry Mackintosh (1820-1896)
