Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
“My dear, that is one of the things that it seems to me impossible I
should understand. Certainly I think his trial as a man would not have
been perfect had he known everything. He too had to live by faith in
the Father. And remember that for the Divine Sonship on earth perfect
knowledge was not necessary, only perfect confidence, absolute
obedience, utter holiness. There is a great tendency in our sinful
natures to put knowledge and power on a level with goodness. It was one
of the lessons of our Lord’s life that they are not so; that the one
grand thing in humanity is faith in God; that the highest in God is his
truth, his goodness, his rightness. But if Jesus was a real man, and no
mere appearance of a man, is it any wonder that, with a heart full to
the brim of the love of God, he should be for a moment surprised that
his mother, whom he loved so dearly, the best human being he knew,
should not have taken it as a matter of course that if he was not with
her, he must be doing something his Father wanted him to do? For this is
just what his answer means. To turn it into the ordinary speech of our
day, it is just this: ‘Why did you look for me? Didn’t you know that I
must of course be doing something my Father had given me to do?’ Just
think of the quiet sweetness of confidence in this. And think what a
life his must have been up to that twelfth year of his, that such an
expostulation with his mother was justified. It must have had reference
to a good many things that had passed before then, which ought to have
been sufficient to make Mary conclude that her missing boy must be about
God’s business somewhere. If her heart had been as full of God and God’s
business as his, she would not have been in the least uneasy about
him. And here is the lesson of his whole life: it was all his Father’s
business. The boy’s mind and hands were full of it. The man’s mind and
hands were full of it. And the risen conqueror was full of it still. For
the Father’s business is everything, and includes all work that is worth
doing. We may say in a full grand sense, that there is nothing but the
Father and his business.”
“But we have so many things to do that are not his business,” said
Wynnie, with a sigh of oppression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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