Friday, June 20, 2014

Gathering in Christ




Acts 4:32
Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.

Try and develop a holy life in private, and you find it cannot be done. Individuals can only live the true life when they are dependent on one another. After the Resurrection, our Lord would not allow Mary to hold a spiritual experience for herself; she must get into contact with the disciples and convey a message to them:

“Do not cling to Me… but go to My brethren and say to them, I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.”

After Peter’s denial, the isolation of misery would inevitably have seized on him and made him want to retire in the mood of “I can never forgive myself” had our Lord not forestalled this by giving him something positive to do – “and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.”

Immediately you try to develop holiness alone and fix your eyes on your own whiteness, you lose the whole meaning of Christianity. The Holy Spirit makes a man fix his eyes on his Lord and on intense activity for others. In the early Middle Ages, people had the idea that Christianity meant living a holy life -- apart from the world and its sociability, apart from its work and citizenship. That type of holiness is foreign to the New Testament; it cannot be reconciled with the record of the life of Jesus. The people of His day called Him a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” because He spent so much time with them.

Excerpts from Oswald Chambers
Daily Devotional Bible, Reading 171 (6-20)
From Biblical Ethics

This photograph is from a Facebook page called Live Life in Color.

No comments:

Post a Comment