November 14 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

1 Corinthians 13:11:

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Devotional:

Our hidden walk with the Eternal Being follows no fixed, uniform model. What presents itself in this exceedingly holy and intensely fervent domain in imitated form arouses by this very imitation the surmise of hypocrisy. Already in human fellowship, all friendship of the more intimate kind seeks escape from the stress of conventional usage. Uniformity in association and fellowship prevails, and may only prevail, with that superficial contact on a broader scale which has the smile of kindness on the face but does not let it rise from the heart.

Our life with God cannot subject itself to the mechanical. Even as in nature, so also in this spiritual domain, the expression of life is organic. And as every tree unfolds a different leaf, and every stem a flower-bud of its own, so every human heart discloses itself to God in its own way, sings before God its own song with its own melody, and tastes in the hidden walk with the Almighty an intimacy of enjoyment which altogether responds to the peculiar need of its own inner existence, and by no other can so be enjoyed.

If anywhere, it is here that the apostolic word applies: "With one after this manner and with another after that." Sex exerts an influence upon this, and temperament, conditions of life, nationality, disposition and character. And even where these data show themselves almost exactly alike in the members of the same family, yet in personality there is such a strong divergence, that the exception is extremely rare when two brothers or two sisters are entirely alike in their religious nature.

But not merely between two or more persons does a sharply defined difference in most cases show itself with respect to this; a similar difference, likewise, shows itself with the selfsame person.

Your own holy experiences in your endeavor to be near unto your God are by no means always of like nature. It is self-evident, moreover, that they differ in degree as to clearness of impression. But that is not all. They also differ in character and nature. They are altogether different in moments of intense joy from what they are in moments of dire need and great anxiety. Robust health or wasting disease puts an altogether different stamp upon your inner existence. After overcoming self in the hour of temptation, your fellowship with God is a something altogether different from what it is after yielding to sin, and falling.

Under all this it is always the selfsame organ in your heart, but entirely different combinations of registration are opened every time, and continual changing of harmony.

And this endless process of change and modification must continually be recalled, because in imitation, in sameness, in uniformity, death reigns; while the rich, full, blossoming life of piety only thrives in endless variety.

Especially upon one difference too much emphasis can not be laid; namely, upon the difference in age.

The Apostle describes it accurately: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child" (I Corinthians 13:11). But it did not continue so. Later on it was altogether different. "When I became a man, I put away childish things." And note carefully how the Apostle emphasizes this difference between the existence of a child and of a man, while he treats of the personal knpwledge we have of God.

Naturally this difference operates very delicately.

The Apostle only places the child over against the full-grown man for the sake of brevity; but it needs scarcely to be said that the lad and the young girl exist differently from the youth and the young maiden; that the man in the strength of his years exists differently from the man in his declining days; and that at the end of the pilgrim journey the grey-haired man exhibits again an image correspondingly different.

Of all these transitions in age and conditions of the inner life our fellowship with God undergoes of itself the necessary influence. What comes, develops itself from what went before. So with the regular, undisturbed development of person, there is a constant enrichment, strengthening and deepening, and, moreover, every new phase of life adds to what went before a newness of self-expression, even in so strong a measure that the aged man finds it almost impossible to think himself back into the bitter struggles of passion in which in those early days he had to defend or to recover his fellowship with God.

But though the modification, change and reformation of the hidden walk with God goes on continuously until the end, yet Christ pointed also to the fact, that with respect to this there is a striking difference between the child and the man, which lends to the inner life of each an altogether different type. Not to recognize this radical difference, so often spoils fundamentally the Christian training.

Provided family and other environment do not from the first choke the seed of religion in a child, the child mind is normally religious. Not by outward show but by receptivity of holy impressions and by a hushed reverence before the Eternal Being. To teach a child to pray, if done under pious guidance and not mechanically, is a beautiful and tender joy.

This does not find its cause in knowledge of the holy. Even when the child cannot yet read, far less is able to follow the catechism, let alone to understand it, he stands instinctively in fellowship with the world of hidden things. He gives himself no account of this. He is himself not conscious of this. He does not know how to explain this, but it is so.

It is even evident in his fear of darkness or of strange phenomena.

This anxiety shows that the child has knowledge and feeling of the existence of another world than that which he sees before his eyes. Hence his faith in the reality of the phantoms that create his fear.

This sense of the existence of a mysterious world, and the feeling that this mysterious world can unveil itself, directly governs the inner life of the child. His delight in fables and fairy-tales is immediately connected with this and works upon his imagination, makes it taut, and gives to the inner existence of the child that intensity and depth, that with such captivating charm addresses you from his eye.

And it is by this selfsame trait that the child instinctively opens his young heart to religion. It is an unseen working that goes out from the unseen world to the heart of the child. It is God Himself Who thus plays upon the delicate harp in the child-heart.

This natural piety of the child has an even more intimate relationship with the life of the blessed, than the religion of us who are full-grown.

With us a whole world of thought, a world of reasoning and of consequent doubt, enters in between, which only at our death is lifted out again.

Hence Jesus' word, that to become as a little child is the regeneration of our person, through which to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Nothing, therefore, is so cruel and so painful, as to see such a little child abandoned to a leading and a training which has no understanding of this whatever, and will treat the child as a miniature adult, killing and destroying the child-type in the child-heart.

Cruel and painful is the mechanical way in which the child is taught to pray, with a voice devoid of feeling, as a something that must be done, without entering with him into the holy devotion, so that he feels himself rather bewildered in his religious earnestness than guided and encouraged.

Equally cruel and painful it is, in the presence of such a little one to be unsympathetic, untactful and impatient in regard to holy things. This hurts the child-heart, and then it does not take long for the tender germ of religion in it to be choked.

It is also cruel to let the years of childhood pass by, without training the child in holy things, and to think that somehow religion will come to him later on. These first years of life are the appointed time in which to let the foundation of all religion in the fellowship with God crystallize in the heart of the child.

There is in the child's heart a natural receptivity, which, guided and fed in a reverent manner, gives a bent to the heart, whose effects will operate beneficially throughout all the later life. And conversely, if this is not attended to, and this first receptivity is brought to naught, then all the life long, the religious sense, even though it awaken later on, will lack that very fervor and tenderness which Jesus asks for in our child-likeness.

This danger can only be averted by bringing the little child at once in his own way, after his nature and type, into fellowship of soul with God Himself.

Of course, the little child must likewise learn sacred history, must learn to know the sacred truths, and identify himself with sacrtd songs. All this is excellent. But all this will avail nothing, if, first of all, in the little child his instinctive sense of a mysterious world does not unfold into an immediate sense of his fellowship with the all-seeing, omniscient, omnipresent God.

This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."

The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit

Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.