Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
For the link in our being to close the circle of immortal oneness with the Father, we must search the deepest of man’s nature: there only can it be found. And there we do find it. For the will is the deepest, the strongest, the divinest thing in man; so, I presume, is it in God, for such we find it in Jesus Christ.
There is nothing for man worthy to be called life, but the life eternal—God’s life, that is, after his degree shared by the man made to be eternal also. For he is in the image of God, intended to partake of the life of the most high, to be alive as he is alive. Of this life the outcome and the light is righteousness, love, grace, and truth.
...but the man to whom God is all in all, who feels his life-roots hid with Christ in God, who knows himself the inheritor of all wealth and worlds and ages, that man has begun to be alive indeed. Let us in all the troubles of life remember that what we need is more life, more of the life-making presence in us making us more alive.
...it is truer that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow—a word for that which cannot be—a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Death can be the cure for nothing, the cure for everything must be life.
Divine history shows how hard it is to for God to create that which shall not be himself, yet like himself. The problem is, so far to separate from himself that which must yet on him be ever and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him—choose him, and say, “I will arise and go to my Father"...
Beyond its own will or knowledge, the whole creation works for the development of the children of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father;..... Then shall the fables of a golden age, which faith invented, and unbelief threw into the past, unfold their essential reality, and the tale of paradise prove itself a truth by becoming a fact.
—we are but getting ready one day to creep from our chrysalis, and spread the great heaven-storming wings of the psyches of God. We groan, waiting for the redemption of the body, the uplifting of the body to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling spirit—nay, like that of Christ, a fit temple and revelation of the deeper indwelling God.
We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be sons—the moment we begin to cry Father. But as the world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few of its thoughts and wants and ways, to begin with: it takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption.
