January 4

Read Matthew 16:24-26

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Matthew 16:24).

Holy Obedience

Yesterday on a radio broadcast I heard Dale Evans testify to a moving religious experience in her adult life. As background she said: “I had, as a girl of ten, taken Christ as my Saviour; but I had never taken Him as my Lord.” I am sure it is this same difference in the dimensions of the Christian life of which Thomas R. Kelly, a Quaker, testifies movingly.

“Meister Eckhart wrote: ‘There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.’ It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without any reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me — commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him…

“When such a commitment comes in a human life, God breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine forces are released, history changes, There is nothing more important now than to have the human race endowed with just such committed lives… To this extraordinary life I call you — or He calls you through me — not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me.

“In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died” (A Testament of Devotion).

Question For Today

Have I taken Christ as my Saviour, but not really as my Lord? Is my Christian life the dull habit or the acute fever? Am I, the kind of Christian that Christ wants me to be?