Note how the moment one's heart has got resurrection as a home, all mere earthly ties and associations lose their hold. We are freed so as to walk with God in the consciousness of the love of Christ wherever He leads. And then it is a small thing where the body lies, if our friends or ourselves should die, though our dust is precious in His sight. Heaven is our home, and our gathering together is unto Him.
The Shepherd sought His sheep from the earnest care of His own heart for it.
As Jesus came from God and went to God, so does the Book that divinely reveals Him come from and elevate to -Him. If received, it has brought the soul to God; for He has revealed Himself in it.
Holiness is not merely separation from evil, but separation to God from evil. The new nature has not merely a nature or intrinsic character, as being of God; it has an object, for it cannot live on itself-a positive object, and that is God. Now this changes everything; because it separates from evil, which it abhors therefore when it sees it, because it is filled with good. We are occupied with good, and hence holy, for that is holiness; and therefore easily and discerningly abhorrent of evil, without occupying ourselves with it. Sanctification is resting (by the enlightening of the Holy Ghost) on an object which by its nature purifies the affections by being their object.
We cannot walk out of darkness but by walking in the light, that is, with God; and God is love, and were He not, we could not walk there.
The Lord knows how to deliver the godly, and to reserve the unjust for judgment: till then! patience and godliness.
We have to pass through the wilderness as belonging to God. Separated to God as sons in the midst of this evil age, we have God's rest set before us; we rest in the atmosphere of death, when we rest anywhere else.
Present failure unfits for present sympathy with God and His people; and present sympathy with God and His people preserves from individual failure.