TO LIVE CHRIST

TO LIVE CHRIST

I shall be glad to hear how you prosper, for prosper we must if travelling the path of life. To walk in His life down here, eating His flesh and drinking His blood, acting as He acted, though apparently atomic, as all life is, rears up a monument for all eternity, a great coral reef. One is so often endeavouring to do some great thing, instead of the greatest of great things, which is always at hand, namely, to live Christ here. Every act that is of His life will endure for all eternity, as the source of it had existed from all eternity. I feel it would at the same time abundantly occupy me and fit me for any service, were I simply set on living Christ here; beginning my day with storing up the manna, and finding not a moment of my time uninteresting or unoccupied, because I had still another, and a fresh step to learn. The same step is not set on the second time. Act the step before you for this moment like Christ, and if you do, it will be recalled and revived at the judgment seat; but if not, that particular brilliant is lost, and you will never wear it. You will have plenty to do all day; and the man most in His life and ways ^[p. 413] is always most fitted and prepared for special services, such as leading a forlorn hope. A slave can adorn the gospel of Christ in all things.

I find that the brightest summer is when the winter has been longest and most severe. The wheat, the best grain, passes a winter in the soil. The bud, or blossom, or fruit, most fragrant of Christ, is the one which nobody knows what it cost me but Himself, and where one had hardly noticed it; like the beautiful wild flowers in the hedgerow, contending with bushes and briars, to shed their fragrance on the unthankful or unthinking traveller going by.