| Things to Live For |
Chapter 16 |
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We may commit our life into the hands of God in the fullest and most far reaching sense. This is what we really do in the act of believing on Christ. Perhaps the conception of Christ as a living person, to whose hands we entrust our soul’s keeping, is not always as vivid as it might be. There is a sense in which we are saved by the death of Christ; but we need toad to this the truth of the living Christ, who is our personal friend, teacher, guide, keeper, the restorer of our soul, and our helper in all ways. He takes our life, with all its sin, frailty, fault, and peril, and by his power cleanses, renews, transforms, trains, and guides, until at last he presents us faultless before the presence of the divine glory.
Then, not our soul only, but our affairs also, may we commit into the hands of Christ. Every life is full of experiences which no human wisdom can make clear. Our affairs are forever getting tangled like threads in a child’s hands, and the tangles we have no skill to straighten out. We cannot see how anything beautiful or good can come out of our poor living or our feeble striving. Ofttimes our circumstances seem to be unfriendly. Our days are full of disappointments, and our nights’ rest is broken by fear and anxieties.
The Christian’s privilege in the midst of such experiences is to commit all into the hands of Christ. He can take our broken things, over which we weep bitterly, and build them up into beauty. One of the finest windows in a great cathedral is said to have been made out of the fragments of broken glass which the workmen had thrown away as worthless. A skilful hand gathered them up, and wrought them into lovely form. Christ can take our failures, our mistakes, our follies, even our falls and sins, and make them into beautiful life and character. He can take our tangled threads, and, disentangling them, weave them into a garment of beauty for us. He can take our disappointments, and change them into divine appointments, so that they shall be radiant paths to blessing and good. It matters not what the burden or the care if only we will lay it in the hands of Christ, and leave it there, he will transform it into good.
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