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
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