THE only influence we should covet, as to service or as to anything else, should be the result of attachment to Christ alone, and dependence upon Him. Affection for Him is the one thing. There will be plenty of trial and difficulty where this exists, but there will be no thwarted affections when He is the object. We shall never find in Him what does not satisfy. This is happiness. There may be plenty in us needing to be subdued, and this will give us trouble, and ‘tis often, alas! to keep the heart up to a sense of His love; but that single word “the Bride, the Lamb’s wife,” is quite enough for us; for was there ever an affection wanting in Christ towards us? Never! Never shall we find defect in the object of our affections, though we shall find defect in the affection in ourselves, lack of ability to enjoy the fullness of our position.
A true sense of the abiding love of Jesus to us is that which gives perfect peace to the heart that is looking to Jesus. One source of our failure in realizing the love of Jesus is, that our hearts, though enlarged by the Holy Ghost, are too little to answer to it. Herein lies the marked difference between the book of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. In Ecclesiastes it is said, “What can the man do that cometh after the king, who hath gathered to himself peculiar treasure of all the sons of men?” But the larger his heart was in its intelligence and in his desires, the less there was to fill it, so that everything issued in “vanity and vexation of spirit.” But what was wanting in the Song of Solomon — primarily applicable, no doubt, to the Jewish remnant — was a heart large enough to take in the all-satisfying object of its love. And oh! what a thing it is, that Jesus and all the glory He has received is ours! as He says, “the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them.”
J. N. D.