Exceedingly blessed is the grace that the Lord is come, the power of God within the sphere of human misery, which extreme as it may be does but make that power evident. If I look around as a man, I am lost. I cannot unriddle the history of the world: abominations in Christendom committed in the name of the Lord; Himself rejected by His people Israel, and crucified by those Gentiles to whom God had entrusted the government of the world; Mohammedanism; heathenism. What kind of a God have you, says the reasoning heart, when it is such a world? But in the gospel I see the Lord came down into all the wretchedness, sickness, sin; and my heart is drawn away from pleasure and sorrow to Him. How beautiful to see heart after heart brought around this One, the only true center, soon to be the risen Head of the new creation, Himself the object drawing out feelings and affections of which. He alone is worthy—Him who by His excellency gives excellency, and by His gracious thoughts toward us produces and draws out gracious thoughts in us. Next, our hearts are fixed just so far as we have an object—fixed according to God when we have Christ Himself before us. How can I love if I have nothing to love? A man is what he feels and likes and thinks. If my soul lives and feeds on that which is most excellent, Christ the bread of God, Christ becomes in a practical sense formed in the heart. In Him—the man Christ Jesus—God has had all His delight, and the display of it too.
J. N. D.