the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
DO YOU KNOW JESUS?
This is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ. - John 17:3
It is the great wonder of human history that after eighteen hundred years the world knows so little of Jesus Christ. The leaders of opinion, the leaders of the literature of England, the men that profess to guide the thoughts of this generation, how little they know, really, about this Master! What profound misconceptions of the whole genius of Christianity, and of Him who is Christianity, we see among the teachers who pay Him high homage and conventional respect, as well as among those who profess to reject Him and His mission! Some people take a great deal more trouble to understand Buddha than they do to understand Christ. How little, too, the mass of men know about Him! It is enough to break one’s heart to look round one, and think that He has been so long time with the world, and that this is all which has come of it.
Light has been shining for all these eighteen hundred years, and yet the mist is so little cleared away, and the ice is so little melted. The great proof that the world is bad is that it does not believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, and that He has stood before it for nearly nineteen centuries now, and so few have been led to turn to Him with the adoring cry, " My Lord and my God." But let us narrow our thoughts to ourselves. This question comes to many of you who shall read these lines in a very pointed way. You have known about Jesus Christ all your lives, and yet in a real, deep sense you do not know Him at this moment. For the knowledge of which I speak is the knowledge of acquaintance with a person rather than the knowledge that a man may have of a book. And it is the knowledge of experience. Have you that? Do you know Christ as a man knows his friend, or do you know Him as you know about Julius Caesar? Do you know Christ because you live with Him and He with you, or do you know about Him in that fashion in which a man in a great city knows about his neighbour across the street there, that has lived beside him for five-and-twenty years and never spoken to him once all the time? Is that your knowledge of Christ? If so, it is no knowledge at all. "I have heard of Him by the hearing of the ear," describes all the acquaintance which a great many of us have with Him.
Oh, my brother! the very fact that He has been so long with you is the reason why you know so little about Him. People that live close by something that men come from the ends of the earth to see have often never seen it. A man may have lived all his life within sound of the Niagara, and perhaps never have gone to look at the rush of the waters.
Is that what you do with Jesus Christ? Are you so accustomed to hear about Him that you do not know Him; having so long heard of Him that you never came to see Him?
'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.
