August 16
Morning Verse
“Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name.” Psalm 29:2
God’s glory is the result of His nature and acts. He is glorious in His character, for there is such a store of everything that is holy, and good, and lovely in God, that He must be glorious. The actions which flow from His character are also glorious; but while He intends that they should manifest to His creatures His goodness, and mercy, and justice, He is equally concerned that the glory associated with them should be given only to Himself. Nor is there aught in ourselves in which we may glory; for who maketh us to differ from another? And what have we that we did not receive from the God of all grace? Then how careful ought we to be to walk humbly before the Lord! The moment we glorify ourselves, since there is room for one glory only in the universe, we set ourselves up as rivals to the Most High. Shall the insect of an hour glorify itself against the sun which warmed it into life? Shall the potsherd exalt itself above the man who fashioned it upon the wheel? Shall the dust of the desert strive with the whirlwind? Or the drops of the ocean struggle with the tempest? Give unto the Lord, all ye righteous, give unto the Lord glory and strength; give unto Him the honour that is due unto His name. Yet it is, perhaps, one of the hardest struggles of the Christian life to learn this sentence—”Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name be glory.” It is a lesson which God is ever teaching us, and teaching us sometimes by most painful discipline. Let a Christian begin to boast, “I can do all things,” without adding “through Christ which strengtheneth me,” and before long he will have to groan, “I can do nothing,” and bemoan himself in the dust. When we do anything for the Lord, and He is pleased to accept of our doings, let us lay our crown at His feet, and exclaim, “Not I, but the grace of God which was with me!”
Morning and Evening. Charles Spurgeon -circa late 1800’s
The italics toward the beginning are mine, added to the original text and presented with the following thought: in the fractious society we live in, how refreshing – how life-giving would it be when looking at one another to have this question in the back of our minds ” for who maketh us to differ from another?” . Recently I heard a live interview from years past of a black American involved in the worst of their conditions and struggles who made this observation in the midst of his conversation, “God chose to give me black skin …”. it was stated quietly in the flow of the conversation and could not have been more powerful – I could have been born with black skin, in those times, facing those same circumstances.
So, the thought: just as this homily of Charles Spurgeon engages us to walk humbly before God, I believe he would agree we also should walk humbly before each other.
