Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: June 6th

"DESPISING THE SHAME"

They therefore departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the Name. - Acts 5:41

The struggles of the Captain of our salvation are the pattern for His people, in what I may call the wholesome and wise contempt for the ills that bar His progress: " Despising the shame."

Contempt is an ugly word, but there are things which deserve it; and though we do not often associate the idea of it with the meek and gentle Christ, there were things in His life on which it was exercised. He despised the contumely. That is to say, He reduced it to its true insignificance by taking the measure of it, and looking at it as it was. And that is what I want you to feel we have all of us in our power. There are hosts of difficulties in our lives as Christian men, which will be big or little just as we choose to make them. You can either look at them through a magnifying or a diminishing glass. The magnitude of most of the trifles that affect us may be altered by our way of looking at them.

Learn the practical wisdom of minimizing the hindrances to your Christian career, pulling them down to their true smallness. Do not let them come to you and impose upon you with the notion that they are big and formidable; the most of them are only white sheets, and a rustic boor behind them, like a vulgar ghost. You go up to them, and they will be small immediately! ’’Despise the shame!" and it disappears. And how is that to be done? In two ways. Go up the mountain, and the things in the plain will look very small; the higher you rise, the more insignificant they will seem. Hold fellowship with God, and live up beside your Master, and the threatening foes here will seem very, very unformidable.

Another way is: pull up the curtain, and gaze on what is behind it The low foot-hills that lie at the base of some Alpine country may look high when seen from the plain, as long as the snowy summits are wrapped in mist; but when a little puff of wind comes and clears away the fog from the lofty peaks, nobody looks at the little green hills in front. So the world’s hindrances, and the world’s difficulties and cares, they look very lofty till the cloud lifts. And when we see the great white summits, everything lower does not seem so very high after all. Look to Jesus, and that will dwarf all difficulties.