| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 26 |
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It is wonderful how gently Christ dealt with His disciples that night. He talked with them as a mother about to leave her children would talk to them, mingled counsel with words of love. He knew how lonely they would be when He was gone away from them. They would indeed be desolate in their sorrow and bereavement. We remember how it was with them those days that He lay in the grave. Then for forty days they saw Him occasionally, receiving sweet consolation from Him. After this He went away, but soon He came again in the Holy Spirit, and after that the disciples were never lonely anymore, for they had their Master’s presence with them in close and loving tenderness all the while. We ought never to feel desolate if we have Christ. Everything else may be stripped off, and we may be driven out into the world, orphans, and homeless; but if we have Christ, we are rich in love and in all heavenly blessing.
The proof of love for God is obedience to His commandment. Then, when love for God is in our lives, God Himself is with us. “If a man loves me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” It is a wonderful truth that is declared to us here, that God actually desires to have our love and longs to make His home in our hearts.
One of the great words of the Bible is peace. Our heart hungers for it. Everywhere men search for it, in paths of pleasure, in the avenues of fame. But peace does not come by finding a quiet place to hide in, away from the world’s storms. It must begin in the heart. Indeed, the peace a Christian has must be a peace that will hold the heart quiet in spite of the world’s storms. Two artists went out to paint each a picture of peace. One painted a silvery lake embosomed deep amid the hills, where no storm ever could touch it. The other painted a wild sea, swept by tempests, strewn with wrecks, but rising up out of it a great rock, and in the rock, high up, a cleft with herbage and flowers, amid which, on her nest, a dove was sitting. The latter is the true picture of Christian peace. “In the word ye shall have tribulation,” but “In me ye shall have peace” (see 16:33). The peace of Christ is a peace that holds the heart quiet in the very heart of the world’s trials. This peace is offered to us here as a gift, as Christ’s legacy to us. We can get it only by taking Christ Himself into our heart.
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