Reverence and Awe

» Today's reading at Blue Letter Bible

MORNING
Jesus, how I love that name! I had major surgery a week ago. Preparation for surgery is a physical, emotional and spiritual process. Physically and emotionally I was ready but I was overwhelmed by the presence of the Lord as I neared the moment where the anesthesiologist comes in to put you to sleep. At that moment my wife Bev was singing "Oh the Deep, Deep Love." "Oh the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free. Rolling as a mighty ocean, in it's fullness over me. Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Your love. Leading onward, leading homeward, to your glorious rest above...". I cannot remember a more peaceful moment in my life. Nothing mattered, I knew the outcome was in the hand of my Jesus, the Great Physician. He would accomplish His purpose. Hallelujah, He did!!

EVENING

"Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written 'For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Nay in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that hath loved us" (Romans 8:35-37)

Jonathan Edwards in Pursuing Holiness in the Lord challenges us by saying "May not this make us ashamed of our cold dead hearts that we hear so often of Christ, of His glorious excellencies and His wonderful love, with so little emotion, our hearts being very commonly frozen up like a clod of earth by worldy affections? And it may be that now and then with much difficulty we persuade ourselves to do a little or expend a little for the advancement of Christ's kingdom and then are ready to boast of it, that we have done so nobly. Such superior examples as we have (Jesus, the apostles, Edwards himself and other great Christians) are enough to make us ever blush for our own attainments in the love of Christ, and to rouse us earnestly to follow after those who have gone so far beyond us".

Holy Spirit quicken us this evening! Make sure Christ is Master of our hearts, and mortify sin in us. "Christ saves His people not in their sins but from them". Lord, save us now from all evil, and enable us to honor our Savior." In Jesus name we pray.

Labels: Devotional, Morning and Evening, Spurgeon