Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
According to the word of the man, however, truth means more than fact, more than relation of facts of persons, more than loftiest abstraction of metaphysical entity—it means being and life, will and action; for he says, “I am the truth.” I desire to help those whom I may to understand more of what is meant by the truth...
I am daring to present a shadow of the Lord’s witnessing, a shadow surely cast by his deeds and his very words! If I mistake, he will forgive me. I fear only lest I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth...
If the Lord were to appear, he has been so misrepresented by such as have claimed to present him, and especially in the one eternal fact of facts—the relation between him and his father—that it is impossible for many that they should see any likeness. For my part, I would believe in no God rather than in such a God as is generally offered for believing in...
"If ye had ever heard the Father’s voice, known his call; if you had ever imagined him, or a God anything like him; if you had cared for his will so that his word was at home in your hearts, you would have known me when you saw me—known that I must come from him, that I must be his messenger, and would have listened to me... "
We shall know one day just how near we come in the New Testament to the very words of the Lord. That we have them with a difference, I cannot doubt. For one thing I do not believe he spoke in Greek. That the thoughts of God would come to the heart of Jesus in anything but the mother-tongue of the simple men to whom he spoke, I cannot think....
Perhaps the Son is saying to the Father, “Thy little ones need some wind and rain: their buds are hard; the flowers do not come out. I cannot get them made blessed without a little more winter weather.” Then perhaps the Father will say, “Comfort them, my son Jesus, with the memory of thy patience when thou wast missing me.”...
When a man truly and perfectly says with Jesus, “Thy will be done,” he closes the ever-lasting life circle; the life of the Father and the Son flows through him; he is a part of the divine organism. Then is the prayer of the Lord in him fulfilled: “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” The Christ in us is the spirit of the perfect child toward the perfect father, our own true nature made to blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men; for our true nature is childhood to the Father....
