May 26 Daily Devotional

Go to the roots

How complex and how complicated is the modern treatment of the parts of man's life! How futile, too, when the central principle is not right. If the eye is evil the whole body also must be full of darkness, however great the struggle to make the different parts light. If the well is poisoned, the stream issuing from it must constantly contain poison, however great the effort to cleanse bucketfuls. James expresses the idea thus in his Epistle: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1). Or as our Lord reminds us, "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies (Matthew, 15:19). What needs to be treated therefore is the center, the heart, the cause of the trouble and not the various manifestations. Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt (Matthew 7.T5-20) we are adjured by our Lord. Treatment must start at the center. It is not what man does, or what he knows, or anything about him which needs to be put right but man himself in his fundamental central relationship to God. It is a poor physician who treats the symptoms and complications only and ignores the disease. And the disease is the soiled and tarnished condition of man's soul as the result of sin. His spiritual eye is beclouded and blinded. The light of God cannot enter it. All the darkness within is due to that and that alone. That alone needs to be treated. How simple and direct is the gospel!

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 90-1

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

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