How can the Lord Jesus Christ think of me, and care for me, and listen to my prayers and answer them, when He has so many millions to think of at the same time? I cannot understand it, and it troubles me a great deal.”
So wrote a true but weak believer to me not long ago. My reply was, “I am like you in one respect, for I cannot understand how the Lord can think of me and treat me as an object of His special care, for I am a mere atom in His vast creation, and one of the least of the myriads of the members of His body, but I believe that He is able to do this, and I know that He does it.
“His watchful eye shall keep
My pilgrim soul amongst.
The thousands of God’s sheep.”
His own words, so full of grace and tenderness, recorded for us in the gospels, abundantly prove this, and since He has gone on high, we are told by the Holy Spirit that “He ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25).
But there is something that should give the heart of the believer a deeper delight than simply knowing that all our needs will be met because He will never cease to care for us, and it, is that every one of His own are of consequence to Him. “I am glorified in them,” He said, and happy is that soul, that, free from self-occupation, desires to be just that which the Lord in His grace would have him, and nothing more.
He is in heaven for us, but we are left on earth to be for Him, and, that He is glorified as we blossom, and bud, and bring forth fruit, should urge us to be more to His mind. I may be only a little daisy in His garden, but He prizes me very much, and likes to have me in His garden, and comes to see after me every day, and confers on me continually, like the shining of the sun, some special mark of His favor. If I know this I shall not be thinking of my own littleness or uselessness, but of the unaccountable care and interest and appreciation of the Owner of the garden.
Flowers do not open out into full bloom on a cold, sunless day, but when the sun invites them they expand into their greatest brilliancy, and it is as we are assured that He delights in us that we are encouraged to go in for all that He desires us to be.
Sin
It is the nature of sin to obtain great, power by little beginnings. God would have us regard sin in its pollution and guilt, and deal with it as done against Him. (Psa. 51:4).
Those who deny the Godhead of Christ, and atonement by His blood know not the nature of their sickness, and so reject the great Physician whom God hath sent.
It is a great principle of God’s government that a sin not repented of becomes a seed which greatly multiplies.
Those who question the everlasting punishment of the rejectors of God’s salvation, betray a slack conscience as to sin, an inability to grasp the meaning of the death of the Son of God, and a rebellion of heart against the testimony of the Scriptures.