Thursday, May 10, 2018

You Won’t Reach It On Tiptoe

May 11 Daily Devotional

My Utmost For His Highest Website
 
Facebook    Instagram    Support Utmost

You Won’t Reach It On Tiptoe

Add…to your brotherliness…love.  2 Peter 1:5, 7 (see moffatt)

Love is indefinite to most of us, we do not know what we mean when we talk about love. Love is the sovereign preference of one person for another, and spiritually Jesus demands that that preference be for Himself (cf. Luke 14:26). When the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ is easily first; then we must practise the working out of these things mentioned by Peter.

The first thing God does is to knock pretence and the pious pose right out of me. The Holy Spirit reveals that God loved me not because I was lovable, but because it was His nature to do so. “Now,” He says to me, “show the same love to others” — “Love as I have loved you.” “I will bring any number of people about you whom you cannot respect, and you must exhibit My love to them as I have exhibited it to you.” You won’t reach it on tiptoe. Some of us have tried to, but we were soon tired.

The Lord “suffereth long….” Let me look within and see His dealings with me. The knowledge that God has loved me to the uttermost, to the end of all my sin and meanness* and selfishness and wrong, will send me forth into the world to love in the same way. God’s love to me is inexhaustible, and I must love others from the bedrock of God’s love to me. Growth in grace stops the moment I get huffed. I get huffed because I have a peculiar person to live with. Just think how disagreeable I have been to God! Am I prepared to be so identified with the Lord Jesus that His life and His sweetness are being poured out all the time? Neither natural love nor Divine love will remain unless it is cultivated. Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained by discipline.

*mean: as used here, something or someone ordinary, common, low, or ignoble, rather than cruel or spiteful. From My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition

Bible in One Year: 2 Kings 13-14; John 2

WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS

We never enter into the Kingdom of God by having our head questions answered, but only by commitment.

from The Highest Good—Thy Great Redemption

 
%%DC::USUTMOST_DYNAMICRULE::USUTMOST_DYNAMICCONTENT%%
 
My Utmost for His Highest Website
Facebook Instagram

My Utmost for His Highest © 1992 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd. Original edition © 1935 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1963 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd. All rights reserved. United States publication rights are held by Discovery House, which is affiliated with Our Daily Bread Ministries.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Manage Your Subscription.

About Oswald Chambers

Contact Us

 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.