the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
THE BLESSEDNESS OF A RIGHT CHOICE
Butter and honey shall he eat that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. - Isaiah 7:15
If you choose Christ, you choose all that your nature needs for its rest, for its peace, for its development, for its expansion, for its efflorescence into growing beauty through eternity. If you will take Christ for your Lord, your heart may fold its wings like the dove that came back from the flood, and may rest in His love, which is perfect and pure and wise and unalterable. If you will take Christ for your choice, and become His servant, and let Him save you and rule you, then all the seeking understanding will find in Him, and in the manifold and endless " treasures of wisdom and knowledge " into which His name breaks - like the sunbeam when it strikes upon the mirror, and is shattered into a million dancing brightnesses - all that the intellect can require. If you will take Christ for your Saviour and your King, then that mastering will which so often leads us astray, and those passions which so often plunge us into filth and mire, will own His guidance; and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the bear in the menagerie of your heart will eat straw like the ox, and you will be able to lay your hand on the cockatrice den and not be stung, and all the wild beasts will be tamed, and your feebleness as that of "a little child shall lead them."
If you will take Christ for your Saviour and your King, the disease of your natures will be healed, which He can only heal. For, oh! no man looks all the facts in the face, or has made a choice worthy of calling by that name, who has not looked the fact of sin in the face, and settled how he is going to get rid of the three-pronged dart which it flings - guilt, and punishment, and power - if he does not take Christ’s way of getting rid of it. There is none that can touch the central corruption of humanity, none that can bring pardon, none that can enable us to shake the venomous beast that has fastened on our hands into the fire, and feel no harm, except Christ only. You may "cut yourselves with knives and lancets after their manner till the blood gush out," and cry to all the gods besides, and to yourself, who are the Jupiter of them all, from morning to evening, to get rid of the fact of sin, and there will be no voice nor answer, " nor any that regarded."
If you will take Christ as your Saviour, and serve Him, you will find it possible to live more noble, helpful, manly lives for God and the world than by any other means. If you will take Christ for your Saviour, and yourselves be enrolled as His obedient servants, then you will secure for yourselves a future without a cloud, in which ills have no power to harm, and all things are transmuted into good, and death has no bitterness and eternity no terror. Let Baal come and do the like. Till he does, I urge that no claims can for a moment be set by the side of Christ’s.
'Music For The Soul' daily readings for a year from the writings of the Rev. Alexander Maclaren, D.D., selected and arranged by the Rev. Geo. Coates, published by A.C. Armstrong and Son, 51 East Tenth Street, (1897). The original text is in the Public Domain and this electronic version is free for anyone without cost or obligation. This a year long daily devotional was written by the Rev. Alexander Maclaren over 100 years ago. This Scottish pastor had a heart to follow Jesus and a love for souls.
