SO, I’m going to keep this short today. I am mulling over where to go with these weekly missives now that we’ve completed Principles of Spiritual Growth. I would ask for your prayers as to how to proceed from here.
AS for now, here is another devotional reading for your mediation from J.R. Miller. I have found this a particular blessing titled, Love and Sorrow. It is written in reference upon the death and burial of our Lord. It reflects a major theme we have studied in Principles of Spiritual Growth, which is – “The way up is down.”
In the inexorable riches of Christ,
Joe
Neh. 8:10, Isa 30:15, Jas. 1:2
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Love and Sorrow – JR Miller
“Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.” Mark 15:47
It was a loving watch — but a hopeless one, which those devoted women kept. No stars shone through their cypress trees that afternoon. To their faith, their Christ was lost; because their faith had taken in only an earthly idea of Messiahship. Death was the end of all the hope they had yet learned to cherish.
It surely was a dark hour for the disciples, when that Friday’s sun sank in the west. Satan seemed to have conquered and utterly to have destroyed the good seed of life, which God had sent down from Heaven.
A Persian fable says that the earth was created a great barren plain, without tree or plant. An angel was sent to scatter the choicest seeds on every spot. Satan, seeing the seeds on the ground, supposed that the sowing of the seeds was God’s work, and determined to destroy it. So he buried all the seeds in the soil, and summoned sun and rain to make them rot away. But while with malignant feeling of triumph, he smiled on the ruin which he had wrought — the seeds which had been buried away to rot — germinated and sprang up, clothing all the earth with plants and flowers, and in beauty undreamed of before. And a voice said from Heaven, “You fool, that which you sow is not quickened, unless it dies.”
The application is obvious. The burial of Christ was thought by His enemies to be the end; but in truth this was the very way to the glory of Christ. He Himself had said, “Except a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies — it abides alone; but if it dies — it brings forth much fruit.” Christ’s burial in the grave, was but the necessary way to His final and glorious victory. So now, when we lay our beloved Christian dead in the tomb — it is in the assured hope of blessed resurrection. The grave is but the shaded way to glory.
