Evening and Morning
By Charles Haddon Spurgeon
December 24
Morning
"For
your sakes he became poor."—2 Corinthians 8:9.
The Lord Jesus Christ was
eternally rich, glorious, and exalted; but "though He was rich,
yet for your sakes He became poor." As the rich saint cannot be true in
his communion with his poor brethren unless of his substance he ministers to
their necessities, so (the same rule holding with the head as between the
members), it is impossible that our Divine Lord could have had fellowship with
us unless He had imparted to us of His own abounding wealth, and had become
poor to make us rich. Had He remained upon His throne of glory, and had we
continued in the ruins of the fall without receiving His salvation, communion
would have been impossible on both sides. Our position by the fall, apart from
the covenant of grace, made it as impossible for fallen man to communicate with
God as it is for Belial to be in concord with Christ. In order, therefore, that
communion might be compassed, it was necessary that the rich kinsman should
bestow his estate upon his poor relatives, that the righteous Saviour should give to His sinning brethren of His own
perfection, and that we, the poor and guilty, should receive of His fulness grace for grace; that thus in giving and receiving,
the One might descend from the heights, and the other ascend from the depths,
and so be able to embrace each other in true and hearty fellowship. Poverty
must be enriched by Him in whom are infinite treasures before it can venture to
commune; and guilt must lose itself in imputed and imparted righteousness ere
the soul can walk in fellowship with purity. Jesus must clothe His people in
His own garments, or He cannot admit them into His palace of glory; and He must
wash them in His own blood, or else they will be too defiled for the embrace of
His fellowship.
O believer,
herein is love! For your sake the Lord Jesus "became poor"
that He might lift you up into communion with Himself.
Evening
"The
glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."—Isaiah 40:5.
We anticipate
the happy day when the whole world shall be converted to Christ; when the gods
of the heathen shall be cast to the moles and the bats; when Romanism shall be
exploded, and the crescent of Mohammed shall wane, never again to cast its
baleful rays upon the nations; when kings shall bow down before the Prince of
Peace, and all nations shall call their Redeemer blessed. Some despair of this.
They look upon the world as a vessel breaking up and going to pieces, never to
float again. We know that the world and all that is therein is one day to be
burnt up, and afterwards we look for new heavens and for a new earth; but we
cannot read our Bibles without the conviction that—
"Jesus
shall reign where'er the sun
Does his
successive journeys run."
We are
not discouraged by the length of His delays; we are not disheartened
by the long period which He allots to the church in which to struggle with
little success and much defeat. We believe that God will never suffer this
world, which has once seen Christ's blood shed upon it, to be always the
devil's stronghold. Christ came hither to deliver this world from the detested
sway of the powers of darkness. What a shout shall that be when men and angels
shall unite to cry "Hallelujah, hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!" What a satisfaction will it be in that day
to have had a share in the fight, to have helped to
break the arrows of the bow, and to have aided in winning the victory for our
Lord! Happy are they who trust themselves with this conquering Lord, and who
fight side by side with Him, doing their little in His
name and by His strength! How unhappy are those on the side of evil! It is a
losing side, and it is a matter wherein to lose is to lose and to be lost for ever. On whose side are you?