Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: May 3rd

THE NEW AND THE LIVING WAY

The way which He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil that is to say, His flesh. - Hebrews 10:20

If we rightly understand our natural condition, it is not only one of bondage to evil, but it is one of separation from God.

Parts of the Divine character are always beautiful and sweet to every human heart when it thinks about them. Parts of the Divine character stand frowning before a man who knows himself for what he is; and conscience tells us that between Him and us there is a mountain of impediment piled up by our own evil. And Christ comes, the Path-finder and the Path; the Pioneer who breaks the way for us through all the hindrances, and leads us up to the presence of God.

For we do not know God as He is except by Jesus Christ. We see fragments, and often distorted fragments, of the Divine nature and character apart from Jesus, but the real Divine nature as it is, and as it is in its relation to me, a sinner, is only made known to me in the face of Jesus Christ. When we see Him we see God. Christ’s tears are God’s pity, Christ’s gentleness is God’s meekness, Christ’s tender drawing love is not only a revelation of a most pure and sweet brother’s heart, but a manifestation through that brother’s heart of the deepest depths of the Divine nature. Christ is the heart of God. Apart from Him, we come to the God of our own consciences, and we tremble; we come to the God of our own fancies, and we presume; we come to the God dimly guessed at and pieced together from out of the hints and indications of His works, and He is little more than a dead name to us. Apart from Christ, we come to a peradventure which we call a God - a shadow through which you can see the stars shining. But we know the Father when we believe in Christ. And so all the clouds rising from our own hearts and consciences and fancies and misconceptions which we have piled together, between God and ourselves, Christ clears away; and in this way He opens the path to God. It is only the God manifest in Jesus Christ that draws men’s hearts to Him. The God that is in Christ is the only God that humanity ever loved. Other gods they may have worshiped with cowering terror and with far-off lip-reverence, but this God has a heart, and wins hearts because He has, and so Christ opens the way to Him. He not only makes God known to us, and not only makes Him so known to us as to draw us to Him, but in that likewise He, by the fact of His Cross and Passion, has borne, and borne away, the impediments of our own sin and transgression which rise for ever between us and Him.