Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 17th

GOD LEADS HIS SHEEP INTO REST

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. - Psalms 23:2

It is the hot noontide, and the desert lies baking in the awful glare, and every stone on the hills of Judea burns the foot that touches it. But in that panting, breathless hour, here is a little green glen, with a quiet brooklet, and a moist lush herbage all along its course, and great stones that fling a black shadow over the dewy grass at their base; and there would the shepherd lead his flock, while the "sunbeams, like swords," are piercing everything beyond that hidden covert. Sweet silence broods there. The sheep feed and drink, and couch in cool lairs till he calls them forth again. So God leads His children. Rest and refreshment are put first, as being the most marked characteristic of God’s dealings. After all, it is so. The years are years of unbroken continuity of outward blessings. The reign of afflictions is ordinarily measured by days. Weeping endures for a night. It is a rainy climate where half the days have rain in them; and that is an unusually troubled life of which it can with any truth be affirmed that there has been as much darkness as sunshine in it.

But it is not mainly of outward blessings that the Psalmist is thinking; they are precious chiefly as emblems of the better spiritual gifts. And it is not an accommodation of his words, but is the appreciation of their truest spirit, when we look upon them, as the instinct of devout hearts has ever done, as expressing both God’s gift of temporal mercies and His gift of spiritual good, of which higher gift all the lower are meant to be significant and symbolic. Thus regarded, the image describes the sweet rest of the soul in communion with God, in whom alone the hungry heart finds food that satisfies, and from whom alone the thirsty soul drinks draughts deep and limpid enough. This rest and refreshment has for its consequence the restoration of the soul, which includes in it both the invigoration of the natural life by the outward sort of these blessings, and the quickening and restoration of the spiritual life by the inward feeding upon God and repose in Him.

The Divine rest is not only a pattern of what our earthly life may become, but is a prophecy of what our heavenly life shall surely be. There is a basis of likeness between the Christian life on earth and the Christian life in heaven, so great as that the blessings that are predicted of the one belong to the other. Only here they are in blossom, sickly often, putting out very feeble shoots and tendrils; and yonder, transplanted into their right soil, and in their native air, with heaven’s sun upon them, they burst into richer beauty, and bring forth fruits of immortal life. Heaven is the earthly life of a believer glorified and perfected. If here by faith we enter into the beginning of rest, yonder, through death with faith, we shall enter into the perfection of it. Heaven will be for us rest in work, and work that is full of rest. Our Lord’s heaven is not an idle heaven, and the heaven of all spiritual natures is not idleness. Man’s delight is activity. The loving heart’s delight is obedience. The saved heart’s delight is grateful service. The joys of heaven are not the joys of passive contemplation, of dreamy remembrance, of perfect repose; but they are described thus: "They rest not day nor night." " His servants serve Him and see His face." Heaven is perfect " rest."