July 26 Daily Devotional

I the Lord change not

The children of God have their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life before the foundation of the world. There is nothing contingent about this. It was ‘before the foundation of the world’ that we were elected. His purposes are immutable and changeless, and they envisage our eternal destiny and nothing less. This is constantly expressed in various ways in the Scriptures.... When people believe things like that they are able to face life in this world in a very different way. That was the secret ... of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11. They understood something of the immutable purposes of God, and, therefore, whether it was Abraham or Joseph or Moses, they all smiled at calamities. They just went on because God had told them to do so, because they knew that His purposes must surely come to pass. Abraham was put to the supreme test of being asked to sacrifice Isaac. He could not understand it but he said: I will do it because I know God’s purposes are sure, and though I have to slay Isaac, I know that God can raise him from the dead. The immutable purposes of God! ...

Then think of His great love. The tragedy of our position is that we do not know the love of God as we should.... In a sense the whole of the First Epistle of John was written in order that we might know that. If only we knew the love of God to us and rested in it (1 John 4:16) our whole fives would be different. How easy it is to prove the greatness of that love in the light of what He has already done in Christ. [Remember] those mighty arguments from the Epistle to the Romans. If while we were yet enemies He has done the greatest thing, how much more, we say it with reverence, is He bound to do the lesser things. The love of God to us!

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, 132–3

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