Looking at self, we despair. Turning from self to Christ, we find that He has fulfilled the whole law, and that, believing in His finished work, we are “justified by faith and have peace with God.” Yet, even when we do realise what Christ has done, how dissatisfied we are with our own poor efforts to show that we love and want to be like Him! Everything in Him is so grandly perfect, and so many littlenesses creep into our best efforts that we are ashamed to look at them.
A dear correspondent gives us a picture which many of us will own to be a reflection of our own feelings.
“I am one of His weak ones, yet longing to live the life that shall glorify Him most. The thing that grieves me so is that I have so little love in my heart towards Him. It is not strong as it ought to be; but Jesus is so precious to me that I want above all things to lead others to Him, that they may know what a Saviour He is!”
Happy girl! To be able to see so much in Christ, so little in self! It is the dissatisfied disciples who cannot be contented to follow their Master “afar off.” They _must_ be ever praying and striving after a closer union with and greater likeness to their Lord. If one of you should write and say, “I am quite satisfied with myself, I am doing the best I can, and I am sure nobody can find fault with me,” I should be very, very sorry for her.
The student who has mastered the rudiments of a science does not sit down contented with the little he knows. He looks to the highest level of knowledge which has been attained by those who have gone before him, and says to himself, “If hard work, earnest, painstaking study and perseverance will do it, I will go a step beyond.”
Many years ago I stood by the death-bed of one who had long passed the fourscore years whose strength is described in God’s word as “labour and sorrow.” She did not talk of what she had done for Christ; but in a few words expressed her sense of what He had done for her.
A volume could not have expressed more than did these half-dozen words; but the light in those aged eyes, and the expression on the face were pledges of the sincerity of the dying speaker.
May you go on and on until, losing sight of self and its poverty of service and of love, you can say, “I have fought the good fight, looking to the Captain of my salvation for courage, and strength, and grace; and now the battle is drawing to a close I can only say, Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” “All in Christ—nothing in me.”