“I used to think that I had lively faith, communion, and hope; but as I get older I find myself more like a babe, faithfully watched over by a mother’s eye, and seem to get more satisfied to see what His thoughts of today are about me, and what His plans for the morrow. Less account made of my feelings, more of His; less notice of my faith, more of the fact that He died in my stead. More consciousness of the worth of His presence in heaven as a fact, than of the feelings which the knowledge of it produces in me—more counting on the certainty of His coming back in order to put the finishing stroke to what He has wrought, than of the flutter of expectancy. Not that the work wrought in us by the Holy Ghost has sunk in value in my thoughts, but that I look more at the outgoings of that work in me. ‘To me to live is Christ.’ ‘The life I live in the flesh ‘I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ Individual attachment of the soul to the person of the Lord seems of growing importance. He bares the wrath in our stead; He has confessed in heaven above His love to us; He means to come and fetch us home. How can I say such things, and not want to see Himself—His own very self? True, when He comes the scene will be surpassingly grand and blessed—Himself, the resurrection and the life, coming out from God to turn the low estate of those who have trusted in Him to an occasion in which to show forth the glories of His own divine person as the resurrection and the life. He will come, and call up out of the grave all that believed in Him; and then, standing on the cloud, will cause the life wherewith He will have quickened those that are alive, and remain to His coming, to burst forth; and then body and spirit shall be as instinct with His life as the souls of His people already are; and He will catch them away to be with Himself forever in the Father’s house. Most blessed as this, the doctrine of 1 Thessalonians 4, is, my soul seems to find its deeper, more individual portion in chapter 1. I appreciate Him, and do so in the very presence of God. He loves me, and I love Him; and I wait for Him to come from heaven. The individuality is so blessedly seen on the one hand, and the contrast on’ the other between this divinely-wrought love to Himself and the poor world all around. It is, too, one’s portion for today just where we are now.”
G. V. W.