EXTRACTS

SCHOOL INFLUENCES School conditions and influences offer serious difficulties to young people, but the greater the opposing circumstances, the more will the “great salvation” be experienced. The Lord, in Revelation chapters 2 and 3, repeatedly says, “I know”. In many experiences young believers suffer keenly, but the circumstances are such that others cannot know and so cannot sympathise, but the Lord knows and makes Himself indispensable to us as coming in in His own way to cheer, giving us to understand that He knows and feels.

David qualifies through conflict in secret, in which he proved Jehovah’s support and deliverance for the great position he occupied in the testimony later. The Lord takes us up to make us something for the testimony, as we see in Peter. You have been held at the crossway by loving care, and now the Lord is saying He has need of you, see Mark 11: 4. That you may grow up in the knowledge of Him and be found useful in His service, will be our prayer for you.

Ex Letter

J. Taylor (Vol. 13, p.409)

It is manifest that as “sent” the Son had a mission to carry out; He was in the position of doing the will of Another. He said Himself, “For I am come down from heaven, not that I should do my will, but the will of him that has sent me”, John 6: 38. This does not imply any inequality between Him and the Father in the Godhead, but it does assert that as come down from heaven He took a relative position in which He did not do His own will but that of the Father. Jesus is God, but obedience is not a proof of His Deity, but of His perfection as Man.

It may be said that His own will could not be otherwise than right, but this does not alter the fact that if He had done His own will it would have been to give up the whole principle on which He lived as Man. No believer needs to be reminded that at a most solemn hour He said,

“But not as I will, but as thou wilt”. It is as Man that He is seen to be the sent One of God the Father. So John can say, “And we have seen, and testify, that the Father: has sent the Son as Saviour of the world”, 1 John 4: 14.

Letters of C. A. Coates, p.283

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