DEVOTION – TUESDAY,
JUNE 26, 2012
“Finding
True Rest”
BY
ALISTAIR BEGG
Reader, can
you find rest apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then consider that your
religion may be in vain. Are you satisfied with anything short of a conscious
knowledge of your union and interest in Christ? Then woe to you. If you profess
to be a Christian while finding full satisfaction in worldly pleasures and
pursuits, your profession is probably false. If your soul can stretch herself
at rest and find the bed long enough and the blanket broad enough to cover it
in the chambers of sin, then you are a hypocrite and far away from any proper
thoughts of Christ or awareness of His preciousness.
But if, on
the other hand, you feel that if you could indulge in sin without punishment,
that would be a punishment itself, and that if you could have the whole world
and live in it forever, it would be quite enough misery not to be separated
from it, for your God—your God—is what your soul longs for, then be of good
courage, you are a child of God. With all your sins and imperfections, take
this for your comfort: If your soul has no rest in sin, you are not as the
sinner is! If you are still crying after and craving after something better,
Christ has not forgotten you, for you have not quite forgotten Him.
The
believer cannot do without his Lord; words are inadequate to express his
thoughts of Him. We cannot live on the sands of the wilderness—we want the
manna that drops from heaven; the pitchers of self-confidence cannot produce
for us a drop of moisture, but we drink of the rock that follows us, and that
rock is Christ. When you feed on Him, your soul can sing, "He who
satisfies me with good so that my youth is renewed like the eagle's";1 but
if you don't have Him, your wine cellar and well-stocked pantry can give you no
sort of satisfaction: Learn to lament over them in the words of wisdom,
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"
1Psalm 103:5
No comments:
Post a Comment