Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
Is it not the sweetest music ear of maker can hear? Except the word of perfect son, “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God!” We, imperfect sons, shall learn to say the same words, too: that we may grow capable and say them, and so enter into our birthright, become partakers of the divine nature in its divinest element, that Son came to us—died for the slaying of our selfishness, the destruction of our mean hollow pride.
It is God to whom every hunger, every aspiration, every longing of our nature is to be referred; he made all our needs, made us the creatures of a thousand necessities. When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, what can please the father of men better than to hear his child cry to him from whom he came, “Here I am, O God! Thou hast made me; give me that which thou hast made me needing.”
God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech. It is those who know and respect only the outsides of religion, such as never speak or think of God but as the Almighty or Providence, who will say of the man who would go close up to God, and speak to him out of the deepest in the nature he has made, “he is irreverent.”
The thought has not yet come to him that that which it would be unfair to lay upon him as punishment, may yet be laid upon him as favor—blessing he would not dare to ask if he saw the means necessary to its giving, but blessing for which, once known and understood, he would be willing to endure all yet again.
For the link in our being to close the circle of immortal oneness with the Father, we must search the deepest of man’s nature: there only can it be found. And there we do find it. For the will is the deepest, the strongest, the divinest thing in man; so, I presume, is it in God, for such we find it in Jesus Christ.
There is nothing for man worthy to be called life, but the life eternal—God’s life, that is, after his degree shared by the man made to be eternal also. For he is in the image of God, intended to partake of the life of the most high, to be alive as he is alive. Of this life the outcome and the light is righteousness, love, grace, and truth.
...it is truer that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow—a word for that which cannot be—a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Death can be the cure for nothing, the cure for everything must be life.
