Morning, April 23 Go To Evening Reading
“Nay, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
—Romans 8:37
We go to Christ for forgiveness and then too often look to the law for power to fight our sins. Paul thus rebukes us, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth? This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” Take your sins to Christ’s cross, for the old man can only be crucified there: we are crucified with him. The spear that pierced Jesus's side is the only weapon to fight sin. To give an illustration, if you want to overcome an angry temper, how do you go to work? You may have never tried the right way of going to Jesus with it. How did I get salvation? I came to Jesus just as I was and trusted him to save me. I must kill my angry temper in the same way? It is the only way in which I can ever kill it. I must go to the cross with it and say to Jesus, “Lord, I trust thee to deliver me from it.” This is the only way to give it a death blow. Are you covetous? Do you feel the world entangle you?
You may struggle against this evil so long as you please, but if it is your besetting sin, you will never be delivered from it in any way but by the blood of Jesus. Take it to Christ. Tell him, “Lord, I have trusted thee, and thy name is Jesus, for thou dost save thy people from their sins; Lord, this is one of my sins; save me from it!” Ordinances are nothing without Christ as a means of mortification. Your prayers, repentances, and tears—the whole of them put together—are worth nothing apart from him. “None but Jesus can do helpless sinners good,” or helpless saints. You must be conquerors through him who hath loved you if conquerors at all. Our laurels must grow among his olives in Gethsemane.
Go To Morning Reading Evening, April 23
“Lo, amid the throne … stood a Lamb as it had been slain.”
—Revelation 5:6
Why should our exalted Lord appear in his wounds in glory? The wounds of Jesus are his glories, jewels, and sacred ornaments. To the eye of the believer, Jesus is passing fair because he is “white and ruddy,” white with innocence, and ruddy with his own blood. We see him as the lily of matchless purity and the rose crimsoned with his gore. Christ is lovely upon Olivet and Tabor and by the sea, but oh! There never was such a matchless Christ as he, who hung upon the cross. There we beheld all his beauties in perfection, all his attributes developed, all his love drawn out, all his character expressed. Beloved, the wounds of Jesus are far fairer in our eyes than all the splendor and pomp of kings. The thorny crown is more than an imperial diadem. Indeed, he bears not now the reed scepter, but there was a glory in it that never flashed from the scepter of gold. Jesus wears the appearance of a slain Lamb as his court dress, in which he wooed our souls and redeemed them with his complete atonement. Nor are these only the ornaments of Christ: they are the trophies of his love and victory. He has divided the spoil with the strong. He has redeemed for himself a great multitude whom no man can number, and these scars are the memorials of the fight. Ah! If Christ thus loves to retain the thought of his sufferings for his people, how precious should his wounds be to us!
“Behold how every wound of his
A precious balm distills,
Which heals the scars that sin had made,
And cures all mortal ills.
“Those wounds are mouths that preach his grace;
The ensigns of his love;
The seals of our expected bliss
In paradise above.”
C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening: Daily Readings (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1896).
February 23: Freedom
Leviticus 14; John 8:31–59; Song of Solomon 7:1–4
“Even though I know it’s wrong, I sometimes think, ‘If I hadn’t accepted Christ, I would have so much more freedom.’ And then I venture down that road and realize how terrible it is. It takes me to a very dark place.”
This profound, heart-wrenching statement by a friend made me realize countless people probably feel this way about Jesus. And what if, unlike my friend, they hadn’t figured out the latter part of this statement? They were perhaps walking a road closer to legalism than the road Christ envisions for our lives. Or they could be so far from experiencing grace and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit that they have yet to see how incredible a life lived for Jesus can be.
Jesus promises freedom: “Then Jesus said to those Jews who had believed him, ‘If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ ” (John 8:31–32). What we often gloss over in this passage, though, is that Jesus is speaking to believers. If you haven’t begun to fully trust in Jesus, the thought that He gives us freedom is difficult to understand. Someone could ask, “Isn’t He creating a system that forces us to live a certain way?” The answer is no: Jesus is setting up what will be a natural response to His grace.
The context of this verse also makes me wonder if someone who hasn’t yet genuinely sacrificed for Jesus, beyond just a simple tithe, would fathom what freedom with Him looks like. The Jews Jesus is addressing would have already been experiencing some sort of social ostracism for their belief in Him—they would have understood that sacrifice brings spiritual freedom.
This concept isn’t easy to grasp, but in the simplest terms possible, Jesus frees us from religious systems and gives us the Spirit to empower us to do His work. This Spirit guides us and asks us to make sacrifices for Him, but those sacrifices are minimal compared to the eternal life He gave us through the sacrifice of His life. These sacrifices don’t become a system with Christ but something we strive to do because we want to. That’s the freedom of the Spirit.
Have you experienced freedom in Christ? How can you seek the Spirit’s presence to experience more freedom?
John D. Barry
John D. Barry and Rebecca Kruyswijk, Connect the Testaments: A One-Year Daily Devotional with Bible Reading Plan (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012).
April 23rd
The worship of the work
Labourers together with God. 1 Cor. 3:9.
Beware of any work for God which enables you to evade concentration on Him. A great many Christian workers worship their work. The one concern of a worker should be concentration on God, which will mean that all the other margins of life, mental, moral, and spiritual, are free with the freedom of a child—a worshipping child, not a wayward child. A worker without this solemn, dominant note of concentration on God is apt to get his work on his neck; there is no free margin of body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes spent out and crushed. There is no freedom, no delight in life; nerves, mind, and heart are so crushingly burdened that God’s blessing cannot rest. But the other side is just as accurate—when once the concentration is on God, all the margins of life are free and under the dominance of God alone. There is no responsibility on you for the work; your only responsibility is to keep in constant touch with God and to see thatng to hinder your cooperation you allow nothi with Him. The freedom after sanctification is the freedom of a child; the things that used to keep the life pinned down are gone. But remember that you are freed for one thing only—to be absolutely devoted to your coworker.
We have no right to judge where we should be put or to have preconceived notions about what God is fitting us for. God engineers everything; wherever He puts us, our one great aim is to pour out a whole-hearted devotion to Him in that particular work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986).
April 23
Perfect love casteth out fear
1 John 4:18
Fear and love rise up in antagonism to each other as motives in life, like those two mountains from which, respectively, the blessings and curses of the old law were pronounced—the Mount of Cursing, all barren, stony, without verdure and without water; the Mount of Blessing green and bright with many a flower, and blessed with many a trickling rill. Fear is barren. Love is fruitful. The one is a slave, and its work is little worth. The other is free, and its deeds are great and precious. From the blasted summit of the mountain, which gendereth to bondage may be heard, the words of the law are listened to, but the power to keep all these laws must be sought on the sunny hill where liberty dwells in love and gives energy to obedience. Therefore, if you would use in your own life the highest power that God has given us for our growth in grace, draw your arguments not from fear but from love.
Alexander Maclaren
Samuel G. Hardman and Dwight Lyman Moody, Thoughts for the Quiet Hour (Willow Grove, PA: Woodlawn Electronic Publishing, 1997).
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