December 21 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps" (1 Pet. 2:21).

Devotional

Beloved reader, perhaps you are barely aware of the high privilege and great glory of being identified with Jesus in his life of humiliation. This is one of the numerous evidences by which your adoption into the family of God is authenticated, and by which your union with Christ is confirmed.

It may be that you are the subject of deep poverty. Your circumstances are straitened, your resources are limited, your necessities are many and pressing. Perhaps you are the "man who has seen affliction" (Lam. 3:1). Sorrow has been your constant and intimate companion. The Lord has been leading you along a path of painful humiliation. You have been "emptied from vessel to vessel" (Jer. 48:11). He has brought you down and laid you low, step by step. And yet, oh, how wisely and how gently, he has been leading you deeper and yet deeper into the valley!

But why this leading? Why this emptying? Why this descending? Even to bring you into a union and communion with Jesus in his life of humiliation!

Is there a step in your abasement that Jesus has not trodden with you—ah! and trodden before you? Is there a sin that he has not carried? Is there a cross that he has not borne? Is there a sorrow that has not affected him? Is there an infirmity that has not touched him?

Even so he will cause you to reciprocate this sympathy and have fellowship with him in his sufferings. As the Head sympathized with the body, so must the body sympathize with the Head.

Yes, the very same humiliation which you are now enduring the Son of God has before endured. And that you might learn something of what that love and grace and power were that enabled him to pass through it all, he pours a little drop in your cup; he places a small part of the cross upon your shoulder; he throws a slight shadow on your soul!

Yes, the very sufferings you are now enduring are, in a faint and limited degree, the sufferings of Christ. "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake," says the apostle, "and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church" (Col. 1:24).

There is a two-fold sense in which Jesus may be viewed as a sufferer. He suffered in his own person as the Mediator of his church. He suffered for his people. Those sufferings were vicarious and complete. In that sense he can suffer no more, "for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).

The other now presents him as suffering in the members of his body. He suffers in his people. In this sense Christ is still a sufferer. Even though he is not suffering to the same degree as he once did, or for the same end, nevertheless he who said, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4), is identified with the church in all its sufferings. In all her afflictions, he is being afflicted. The apostle therefore terms the believer's present sufferings as "Christ's afflictions" (Col. 1:24).

To God my earnest voice I raise,
to God my voice imploring prays;
before his face my grief I show
and tell my trouble and my woe.

(The Psalter, 1912)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.