Enjoy today's chapter:
2 Corinthians 5:19-21
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.
And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ's ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us.
We speak for Christ when we plead, "Come back to God!"
For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
(New Living Translation)
Outside the Eden Gate 3
When Jesus came, the Jews, to whom His messages to the world were directly spoken, were in almost the last stages of being unable to hear from their loving heavenly Father.
So Jesus, with the fine faithfulness of love blending with the keenest tact, spoke in language veiled by parable to overcome the intense prejudice against plainly spoken truth.
They were so set against what He had to tell, that the only way to get anything into them at all was so to veil its form as to cause them to come to their own conclusions about what He was saying.
Toward the close, His keenness, for which they were no match, joining with the growing keenness of their hate, made them see at once that the sharp edge of some of those last parables was turned toward themselves.
In explaining to His puzzled disciples about this form of teaching, with a sad irony that reveals both His heart's yearning and His mental keenness, He uses more than once with variations this famous bit from Isaiah.
He makes the truth stand out more sharply by stating the opposite of what He desires, making the contrast between His words and His known desires so strong, as not only to make plain the meaning intended, but to give it a sharper emphasis.
The result that began with ears and eyes quickly affected the tongue. That is nature's path. The inner road from ear and eye is straight to the tongue.
The tongue is the index of man's whole being. While through ear and eye he receives all that ever gets in, through the tongue his whole being is revealed. Of course his personality reveals itself very much otherwise. In the carriage of the body.
Strikingly so in the look of the eye. The body itself, especially the face, becomes in time the mould of the spirit within. Yet the tongue - what is said, how it is said, what is not said, the tone of voice - the tongue is the index of the spirit.
There is no stronger indication of mastery over one's powers than in control of the tongue.
When God would break up man's first great ambitious scheme of a self-centred monopoly on the Shinar plains, He simply touched his tongue.
The first evidence of God's touch in the re-making of man on that memorable Pentecost day was upon his tongue.
The effect upon his tongue of the break with God has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement.
Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There is a strange backward movement in biting sometimes. With all that, there is a strange looseness of speech regarding the holiest things, and the most awesome truths, and the Holy One Himself. |
A Prayer for Today
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