Diligence of Grace.
Luke 2:49 KJV
And He said to them,
Why is it that you were looking for Me?
Did you not know that I had to be
in My Father’s house?
Anecdotes
Life must be wholly a manifestation of God.
Every age is of value. Each section of life brings its own contribution to the perfected Christian character.
Childhood has its own forces, its own kinds of strength and power, which other parts of life do not furnish; and they must be used in developing the man of God.
You lose something if you put off religion to your later years.
Your religious character never feels the benefit and power of these child forces, which do not belong to later life.
You know the value of an overture in music; how its simplicity helps all the remainder of the more elaborate variations and movements.
You could not start at once into the midst of the symphony or oratorio, and intelligently enjoy and use it.
So youth brings its own peculiar contribution to the harmony of godly, Christly living.
That is the teaching of the Boyhood of Christ.
As the day without its dewy morning and all its influences; as the day beginning with hot noon; so is a life which begins for God at late years.
We disjoint our religious lives, not seeing that ‘the child is the father of the man,’ and that all our days must be bound each to each by natural piety.
Christ puts them altogether again, shows God in and through all of them, even in and through boyhood, and says, “It is not merely that you may be God’s at the end; it is that all from the beginning may be His; and that at the end you may have a product towards which every stage of living has assisted.”
May the Christ, the truest human child that has ever lived, win all the freshness and young strength there is yet in us for His Father.
In the Father’s house
Dr. Parr, in his Life of Archbishop Ussher, relates that while that prelate was once preaching in the church at Covent Garden, a message arrived from the Court that the king wished immediately to see him.
He descended from the pulpit, listened to the command, and told the messenger that he was then, as he saw, employed in God’s business, but as soon as he had done he would attend upon the king to understand his pleasure;
and then continued his sermon.
Business
I once read a little fable about a hard frost.
When everything was frozen there was one little stream running still.
It was not frozen, and somebody said to the little stream, “Little stream, why aren’t you frozen?”
The reply was, “I am too busy to be frozen.
I am going too fast, too quickly, to be frozen.”
The best way is to be very busy — have plenty to do.
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