FROM THE BOOKSHELF:

DIVINE WORKMANSHIP

The most complex creature in the universe of God is a saint. As the subject of God’s handiwork, he is made up of diverse moral qualities. Each quality is to find its place in each of us, though in varying measure it may be. Let me enumerate some of these qualities, though no doubt others could be added; yet what a list! Let us read them and pray over them, that they may find their place in us. All these precious features have been given living expression to in Christ, and so become most attractive. It is the moral worth as well as the glory of the Person that endears Christ to the heart:

Read this list:

faith                  hope                  love

obedience            dependence             confidence

meekness            lowliness            gentleness

patience             kindness            goodness

intelligence       righteousness      piety

holiness            purity                  harmlessness

endurance            longsuffering            wisdom

knowledge            boldness            purpose

faithfulness            peace                  truth

joy                  worship            discernment

light                  compassion            mercy

comfort            consolation            courage

thanksgiving      subjection            suffering

What an amazing production! Is there any one of these we would care to be deficient in? The marvel is that all these could be crowded so to speak into one tiny vessel like you and me. Yet these and others too are being brought to light through God’s patient ways with us. There must be the practical setting aside of the flesh in us to make room for these holy emotions to sway us.

One begins to desire and pray for enlargement, like Jabez of old, that there might be more room for the Spirit to operate in us. How pleasing to God when such desires prompt our petitions.

Let us go over this list and judge whether we have been marked by these. Pick out any one and say whether we would not wish to be characterised in greater measure by it; then add another, and yet another, and still another, and so on.

In the description of Satan, in Ezekiel 28, we read that he sealed up the measure of perfection, “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty”. Yet the believer, as conformed to the image of God’s Son, will yet shine in features of moral beauty and glory that Satan never knew. Features produced in love’s suffering path once trodden by the Son of God.

Think of the grand result secured, a universe filled by features that once were seen in a lowly Man there.

May this moral transformation be carried on in each of us, as the result of contemplating Christ, who presents before God the sum of divine perfection in manhood.

 

 

E.L.Moore

Words of Grace and Comfort

1933; Vol. 9: pp 66, 67