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Day 5 - Thursday - My Utmost for His Highest - Logos

 February 24th

The delight of sacrifice

I will very gladly spend and be spent for you. 2 Cor. 12:15.

When the Spirit of God has shed abroad the love of God in our hearts, we begin deliberately to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ’s interests in other people, and Jesus Christ is interested in every kind of man there is. We have no right in Christian work to be guided by our affinities; this is one of the most extensive tests of our relationship to Jesus Christ. The delight of sacrifice is that I lay down my life for my Friend, not fling it away, but deliberately lay my life out for Him and His interests in other people, not for a cause. Paul spent himself for one purpose only—that he might win men to Jesus Christ. Paul attracted to Jesus all the time, never to himself. “I am made all things to all men, that I might, by all means, save some.” When a man says he must develop a holy life alone with God, he is of no more use to his fellow men: he puts himself on a pedestal, away from the ordinary run of men. Paul became a sacramental personality; wherever he went, Jesus Christ helped Himself to his life. Many of us are after our own ends, and Jesus Christ cannot help Himself in our lives. If we are abandoned to Jesus, we have no lots of our own to serve. Paul said he knew how to be a ‘door-mat’ without resenting it because the mainspring of his life was devotion to Jesus. We are apt to be devoted not to Jesus Christ but to the things which emancipate us spiritually. That was not Paul’s motive: “I could wish myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren”—wild, extravagant—is it? When a man is in love, it is not an exaggeration to talk in that way, and Paul is in love with Jesus Christ.


 Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year. Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986. Print.


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