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In short, not only passively to accept joy or grief, but to take means to secure the one and escape the other; to "work out our own salvation" for each day, as we are told to do it for an eternity, though with the same divine limitation humbling to all pride, and yet encouraging to ceaseless effort "for it is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure."
In the meanwhile, let us reason that if our Lord was so careful to subordinate Himself to the Father that He might be all in all, it well becomes us to restrain ourselves, to abstain from speaking our own words or doing our own works, that Jesus may pour His energies through our being, and that those searching words may be fulfilled in us also, "Striving according to His working, which worketh in Me mightily."
And let us not confound remorse with repentance 'The sorrow of the world worketh death. Saul grovelled in agony that day, but tomorrow he was raging again with more than the old frenzy of hate. Many a man says, 'I have played the fool, and yet goes on playing it again when the paroxysm of remorse has stormed itself out.
Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved. But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air: but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world, to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright, why and how that maker made him.
Oh that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine, as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel! And this is the devilish ploughing, the which worketh to have things in Latin, and letteth the fruitful edification. But here some man will say to me, What, sir, are ye so privy of the devil's counsel, that ye know all this to be true?
No wonder! for with whom does the man work when he works in opposition to the will of God? In refusing to serve God, he serves Satan, and becomes a "worker together" with "the spirit who now worketh in the children of disobedience!" Well, then, what are you to do? I reply: "Yield yourselves to God;" "be subject to the Father of your spirit, and live."
He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions. So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian. In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.
Our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." "Yes, that is true indeed," said my father, "and things might have gone much worse with us." "Can you say that, my father," said I, "when you have lost all?" "I have not lost all," replied he.
When we gazed upon the riches of God's grace, they were high above us, when we looked upon 'the power that worketh in us, we saw it working amidst many hindrances and hamperings, but here there is presented to us in a concrete example, close beside us, of what God can make of a man when the man is wholly pliable to His will, and the recipient of His influences.
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