Pilgrim
Portions
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Weeks
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There is rest in the calming
grace
That flows from those realms above What rest in the thought! we shall see His face, Who has given us to know His love! Oh! when will the
heart of man, even in thought, rise to the height of God’s grace and
patience? It is the love
that is in God, not any loveliness in the sinner, that accounts for the
extravagant liberality of his reception in Christ. What the natural
man understands by mercy is not … God’s blotting out sin by the
bloodshedding of Jesus, but His passing by sin with indifference. This
is not grace. There is no
giving in the “far country,” not even of husks. Satan sells all, and
dearly—our souls are the price. You must buy everything. The world’s
principle is “nothing for nothing.” Would you find a
giver? You must come to God. Grace has no
limits, no bounds. Be we what we may (and we cannot be worse than we
are), in spite of that, God towards us is LOVE. His grace … is
ever more astonishing … and it so connects itself with every fibre and
want, too, of our hearts in Christ’s becoming man, that it brings us
into a place which none can know who are not in it. And yet one is
nothing in it, though united to Him who is everything—and to be nothing
is to be in a blessed place. The law may
torture the conscience, but grace humbles. “While we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We see just two things in this—that
the sinner is without strength, without riches. Like the poor prodigal,
he has spent all he had, and now he comes to himself, and is about to
return, he has nothing to bring with him. Like a shipwrecked mariner,
all is thrown overboard, everything going adrift, and he himself
struggling with the dark billows is just cast ashore, wearied and poor,
having nothing! But blessed be God, if we have got to shore, God is
there, and He is for us … and we know we shall not be cast out again,
and that we may lay claim now to all things that God can give. “He that
spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he
not with him also freely give us all things?” The way I come at
the sense of the immensity of sin is by the immensity of the grace that
has met it. “That in the ages
to come he might shew the exceeding riches of grace in his kindness
toward us by Christ Jesus.” This is the way
the angels will learn, and principalities and powers in the heavenly
places, the meaning of “the exceeding riches of his grace.” They will
see the poor thief, and the woman of the city that was a sinner;
ourselves, too, in the same place and glory as God’s Son! In the desert God will teach thee
What the God that thou hast found; Patient, gracious, powerful, holy, All His grace shall there abound! The word, “Well
done, good and faithful servant,” sounds sweet in the ears, and most so
in his who knows that by His grace alone can we be one or the other. Pilgrim Portions - Meditations for the Day of Rest - Selected from the Writings, Hymns,
Letters, etc., of J. N. Darby SEDIN-Servicio Evangélico |
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