THOUGHTS

March 18, 2020

These gray days are doing a work upon this wet, dripping earth with a pallet of mud.

"The trees were covered with baby

leaves, half wrapped in their swaddling clothes."

George MacDonald

Found a favorite poem among my mother's things...

"Thou broadenest out with every year

Each breath of life to meet.

I scarce can think Thou art the same,

Thou art so much more sweet.

Changed and not changed,

Thy present charms

Thy past ones only prove.

Oh, make my heart more strong to bear

This newness of Thy love.

Jesus, what has Thou grown to now?

A joy all joys above...

With gentle swiftness lead me on,

Dear God, to see Thy face;

And meanwhile in my narrow heart,

Oh, make Thyself more place!"

Faber

I love those last two lines.  What a prayer!  

My grandfather George Wise was raised on a dirt farm in the middle of Texas, in a church built on land donated on the corner of their fields.  He left that farm and traveled to New York to join the Salvation Army there for a short time.  He was musically inclined, so I can imagine him singing and playing on those busy street corners.  In fact, there is a photo somewhere of him doing just that. We think of the Salvation Army as the compassionate ministry to the needy, even as we see it operating in our present crisis.  Yet, in its founding it was a ringing bell to let all hear the preaching of holiness.  Indeed, there can hardly be lifting up of the hearts of the broken without teaching them to wholly surrender.  Here is another excerpt from Colonel Brengle's "A Way to Holiness."

"4.  In speaking of Himself, Jesus says, 'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.' (John 14:11)  And then He says of His disciples, 'At that day' (the day of Pentecost, when the Comforter comes), 'ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you.' (John 14:20)  We are, then, to be like Jesus by having God dwelling in us. 

So we see that the Bible teaches that we can be like Jesus.  We are to be like Him in our separation from the world, in purity, in love, and in the fulness of the Spirit.  This is holiness.

This work was begun in you when you were converted.  You gave up your sins.  You were in some measure separated from the world;  the love of God was in some degree shed abroad in your heart, and you felt that God was with you.  But unless you have been sanctified wholly, you also feel that there are yet roots of bitterness within: quickness of temper, stirrings of pride, too great a sensitiveness to praise or blame, shame of the Cross, love of ease, worldly-mindedness, and the like.  These must be taken away before your heart can be made clean, and love to God and man made perfect, and the Holy Spirit can have all His way in you.  When this is done, you will have the experience which the Bible calls holiness, and which The Salvation Army rightly teaches is the birthright of all God's dear children."

  

"Holiness, then, for you and for me, is not maturity, but purity; a clean heart in which the Holy Spirit dwells, filing it with pure, tender, and constant love to God and man...All that God asks is that the heart should be cleansed from sin, and full of love, whether it be the tender heart of the little child, with feeble powers of loving, or the full-grown man, or of the flaming archangel before the Throne.  It is nothing less than this, and it can be nothing more."

"Jesus, Thine all-victorious love

Shed in my heart abroad:

Then shall my feet no longer rove,

Rooted and fixed in God."

Holiness is as much a gift as that of salvation, received by faith.  It can never be earned.  It is a divine work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts once we become aware of our divided heart and the constant warring, the push me-pull me against sin.  But hallelujah, there can come a time of complete surrender.

In this time of close quarters and disrupted schedules, what is in the heart is revealed, even in that of children.  "Theses are the times that try men's souls."  Yes,  our angelic cherubs can become unholy terrors, despots seeking control.  But even in our human frailties, God is still at work.  He is not finished yet.  Even God has homework.