Thursday, September 25, 2014

The Gift of Joy

"His name shall be called Immanuel,....God with us."

By coming to dwell with us, Jesus was to reveal God both to men and to angels.  He was the word of God,--God's thought made audible.  In His prayer for His disciples He says, "I have declared unto them Thy name,"--"merciful and gracious, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,"--"that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them."  But not alone for His earthborn children was this revelation given.  Our little world is the lesson book of the universe.  God's wonderful purpose of grace, the mystery of redeeming love, is the theme into which "angels desire to look," and it will be their study throughout endless ages.  Both the redeemed and the unfilled beings will find in the cross of Christ their science and their song.  It will be seen that the glory shining in the face of Jesus is the glory of self-sacrificing love.  In the light from Calvary it will be seen that the law of self-renouncing love is the law of life for earth and heaven; that the love which "seeketh not her own" has its source in the heart of God' and that in the meek and lowly One is manifested the character of Him who dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto.

In the beginning, God was revealed in all the works of creation.  It was Christ that spread the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth.  It was His had that hung the worlds in space, and fashioned the flowers of the field.  "Who established the mountains by His strength."  The sea is His, for He made it." Psalm 65:6:95:5.  It was He that filled the earth with beauty, and the air with song.  And upon all things in earth, and air, and sky, He wrote the message of the Father's love.

Now sin has marred God's perfect work, yet that handwriting remains.  Even now all created things declare the glory of His excellence.  There is nothing, save the selfish heart of man, that lives unto itself.  No bird that cleaves the air, no animal that moves upon the ground, but ministers to some other life.

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