GOD’S WORD FOR APRIL 22 ~ ~ Romans 1:17 ~ ~ “The just shall live by faith.”
We’re continuing in Andrew Murray’s classic book, “Abide in Christ”. Continuing in chapter 5, “As You Came to Him by Faith.”
Apply your experience in coming to Jesus, to abiding in Him. Now, as then, the temptations to keep you from believing are many. When you think of your sins since you became a disciple, your heart is cast down with shame, and it looks as if it were too much to expect that Jesus should indeed receive you into perfect intimacy and the full enjoyment of His holy love. When you think how utterly, in times past, you have failed in keeping the most sacred vows, the consciousness of present weakness makes you tremble at the very idea of answering the Savior’s command with the promise, “Lord, from henceforth, I will abide in You.” And when you set before yourself the life of love and joy, of holiness and fruitfulness, which in the future are to flow from abiding in Him, it is as if it only serves to make you still more hopeless: you, at least, can never attain to it. You know yourself too well. It is no use expecting it, only to be disappointed; a life fully and wholly abiding in Jesus is not for you.
OH! That you would learn a lesson from the time of your first coming to the Savior! Remember, dear soul, how you then were led, contrary to all that your experience and your feelings and even your sober judgment said, to take Jesus at His word and how you were NOT disappointed. He did receive you and pardon you;
He did love you and save you – you know it. And if He did this for you when you were an enemy and a stranger, do you not think, now that you are His own, He will not much more fulfill His promise? OH, that you would come and begin simply to listen to His Word and to ask only the one question: Does He really mean that I should abide with Him: the answer His Word gives is so simple and so sure: by His almighty grace you now are IN HIM: that same almighty grace will indeed enable you to abide in Him. By faith you became partakers of the initial grace; by that same faith you can enjoy the continuous grace of abiding in Him.