Having learned a little of God’s greatness, we need to seek His glory day in and day out. God is our King. That fact is not altered by the fluctuations in our circumstances or feelings, and our gratitude ought not to depend on these things either.
We must be captivated by higher values: the love of God and His creatures. Freedom does not mean having no master; it means having a wise and loving Master. To bind ourselves to Him is to be set free from the consequences of every lesser love.
Being conformed to God’s character is what we desire, and being able, when the time comes, to see His face is what we long for. It does not matter whether our passage is comfortable. What matters is that we are making progress toward God.
Living in a society where competition in all its myriad forms is almost a national obsession, we need to watch out. When we find ourselves in conflict with another person over some spiritual matter, what are our real motives for waging war?
Only God can be a perfect source of confidence, and it’s sinful to try to make anyone else fill the role that He alone was meant to fill. He is infallibly trustworthy. We may “commit [our] souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator.”
Rejecting what we’ve come to know of God’s will is so foolish, none of us would ever do it if we weren’t deceived. But therein lies the power of sin. The devil is shrewd enough to make slavery seem, for the moment, like it’s better than what we have.
Crude words, and certainly irreverent ones, are almost always symptomatic of a heart that is turned away from God. So Jesus warned us, “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:37).
We should be willing to make serious sacrifices for our enemies. God did more than talk about loving His enemies; He sacrificed His Son’s life for them. What treasure would we sacrifice — yes, sacrifice — to promote the salvation of our enemies?
We may feel a warm, condescending glow of ever-so-subtle superiority when we think how little others have suffered. “When they’ve been around as long as we have, they’ll see things differently,” we sigh, congratulating ourselves for being older.
We must acquire the ability to engage in, and even enjoy, things that lead us to God without making idols of these things. All these activities, as pleasant as they are, are a means to a great End. We must constantly bring our minds back to that End.
