August 13 Daily Devotional

Now on a higher plane I dwell

Do I always place everything in my life, and everything that happens to me, in the context of my Christian faith, and then look at it in the light of that context? The heathen cannot do that.... He does not believe in God, or know anything about Him; he has not this revelation of God as his Father and himself as His child.... But what really proves that we are Christians is that, when these things come to us, or happen to us, we do not see them just as they are; as Christians we take them and put them immediately into the context of the whole of our faith and then look at them again....

Our Lord asked His disciples, ‘Where is your faith? Why are you not applying it?’ ... Something happens to us that tends to upset us. The heathen in the natural man makes him lose his temper, or become hurt and sensitive. But the Christian stops and says, ‘Wait a minute. I am going to take this thing and put it into the context of everything I know and believe about God and my relationship to Him’. Then he looks at it again. Then he begins to understand what the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews means when he says, ‘whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth’. Because the Christian knows that, he is able to enjoy it, in a sense, even while it is happening, because he puts it into the context of his faith.... Is my conduct and my behaviour in life such that it shows I am a Christian? Do I show plainly and clearly that I belong to a higher realm, and that I can raise everything about me to that realm? ... Realize what you are; remember who you are and live accordingly. Rise to the level of your faith; be worthy of your high calling in Christ Jesus. Christian people, watch your lips, watch your tongues. We betray ourselves in our conversation ... in the things that come out in our unguarded moments ... the Christian exercises discipline and control because he sees everything in the context of God and of eternity.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 140–1