THE GOD STANDARD
Exodus 20:2-17
Man needs a standard. The yardstick protects the seller from giving too much, and the buyer from getting too little. The ten practical Sinai Words give us the true standard of life on both positive and negative sides —what belongs in and what out. They begin with God and take in our neighbors and ourselves. Putting God first makes the whole life ring true. By his help we can keep him first, and so keep true.
Colossians 1:9 For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;
Think about these questions as you meditate on the verse. What does this verse teach me? How does this verse apply to my Life?
SHAPING THE CHILD
Mark 10:13-16; Matthew 18:1-6
Children and women were commonly despised when Jesus came. He revealed their true worth and place. We need the children as really as they need us. Before the hurt of sin has come to them they teach us purity and simplicity, trust and honesty. They absorb their surroundings. Children will be just what their elders are, whom they touch daily. It’s only as our lives are yielded wholly to Jesus’ control that our children can come into their rightful heritage.
SHOES OFF, AND HAT, TOO
Mark 10:1-12
Sin steals away reverence, and would make the finest things cheap and common. Love hallows everything it touches—real love. It reveals the sacredness of life’s relationships. It puts a touch of tender awe, of thoughtful reverence, on the sacred intimacies, the holy privacies, of love and home and daily contacts, that hallows and enriches these, and holds them true to what should be. Reverence deepens as we see the working of God in nature’s processes.
LIFE AT FLOOD-TIDE
Mark 10:17-31
A swift stream, at flood, frequently changes its channel, leaving the old, cutting out an entirely new bed. The Holy Spirit floods the life with love when he is allowed sway, Rom_5:5, literal meaning. The old standards that can’t stand the wash of this flood are left behind; new standards are set, flood-tide standards, with rich fertilizing silt, till we wonder how we ever lived the old way. And the upward tug of the new standards affects everything.
1 Peter 3:18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:
Think about these questions as you meditate on the verse. What does this verse teach me? How does this verse apply to my Life?
THE REAL HUMAN
1Corinthians 13:1-13
Love is a fire. It burns out the impurities, puts warmth in the heart and a gentle glow in the life, and tempers all to the best. God is love. Man is love, too, when true to the image in which he was made.
Jesus is love in human garb. To let Jesus in as a passion, the burning passion, is to have selfishness, with all its brood, burned out, and the true ideal made real. Then we live the life that blesses other lives.
