Quiet Talks about JesusGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks about Jesus
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Jesus Christ -- Person and offices
God is _love_. He yearns for love. He loves. And more, He _is_ love. Man
is like God in his yearning for love, in his capacity for love, and in his
lovableness. Man must love. He lives only as he loves. True love, and only
that, is the real life. He will give up everything for love. He is
satisfied only as he loves and finds love. To love is greater than to be
loved. One cannot always have both. God does not. But every one may love.
Every one does love. And only as there is love, pure and true--however
overlaid with what is not so--only so is there life.
God is _holy_. That word seems to include purity and righteousness. There
is utter absence of all that should not be. There is in Him all that
should be, and that in fulness beyond our thinking. Man was made holy.
There is in the Genesis picture of Eden a touch that for simplicity and
yet for revealing the whole swing of moral action is most vivid. In the
presence of conditions where man commonly, universally, the world around,
and time through, has been and is _most sensitive to suggestion of evil_
there is with this first man the utter absence of any thought of evil.[1]
In the light of after history there could be no subtler, stronger
statement than this of his holiness, his purity, at this stage.
And in his _capacity for holiness_, in that intensest longing for purity,
and loathing of all else, that comes as the Spirit of God is allowed
sway, is revealed again the capacity for God-likeness. It is the prophetic
dawn within of that coming Eden when again we shall _see His face_, and
have the original likeness fully restored.
God is _wise_, all-wise. Among the finest passages of the' Christian's
classic are those that represent God as personified wisdom. And here
wisdom includes all knowledge and justice. That the Spirit of God breathed
into man His own mental life is stated most keenly by the man who
proverbially embodied in himself this quality of wisdom. "The spirit of
man is the lamp of the Lord searching out the innermost parts." The
allusion is clearly to intellectual powers. There is in man the same
quality of mental keenness that searches into things as is in God. It is
often dulled, gripped by a sort of stupor, so overlaid you would hardly
guess it was there. But, too, as we all know, it often shines out with a
startling brilliance. It is less in degree than with God, but it is the
same thing, a bit of God in man. This explains man's marvellous
achievements in literature, in invention, in science, and in organization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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