Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
This commending of our spirits to the Father is not a grievous burden, but the highest privilege we possess, the simplest, most blessed thing in the world. For a man may say, I am going out into the business and turmoil of the day, where so many temptations may come to do less faithfully, less kindly, less diligently than the Lord would have me do. Father, into thy hands.
He had been amongst his brethren what he would have his brethren be. He had done for them what he would have them do for God and for each other. God was henceforth inside and beneath them, as well as around and above them, suffering with them and for them, giving them all he had, his very life-being, his essence of existence, what best he loved, what best he was.
But what is to be done when all feeling is gone? When a man does not know whether he believes or not, whether he loves or not? When art, poetry, religion are nothing to him, so swallowed up is he in pain, or mental depression, or temptation, or he knows not what. It seems to him then that God does not care for him, and certainly he does not care for God.
Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God…
Could it not be other than a temptation to think that he might, if he would, lay a righteous grasp upon the reins of government? Glad visions arose before him of the prisoner breaking jubilant from the cell of injustice, of the widow lifting up the bowed head before the devouring Pharisee. Could he not mold the people at his will? Could he not, transfigured in his snowy garments, call aloud in the streets of Jerusalem, “Behold your King?” The fierce warriors of his nation would beat their ploughshares into swords to fight a grand holy war against the tyrants of the race.
