TO HIS WIFE.
22d June1864.
May the Lord
preserve you
from all evil, and
cause all the evil that assaults you to work out His own
purposes,
that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in you, and may you see the
eternal weight of glory behind the momentary lightness of
affliction,
and so get your eyes off things seen and temporal, and be refreshed
with
the things eternal! Now love is an eternal thing, and love
between
father and son or husband and wife is not temporal if it be the
right
sort, for if the love of Christ and the Church be a reason for loving
one
another, and if the one be taken as an image of the other, then,
if the mind of Christ be in us, it will produce this love as part of
its
complete nature, and it cannot be that the love which is first
made
holy, as being a reflection of part of the glory of Christ,
can be any way lessened or taken away by a more complete transformation
into the image of the Lord.
I have been
back at 1 Cor.
xiii. I think the
description of charity or divine love is another loadstone for our
life—to
show us that this is one thing which is not in parts, but perfect in
its
own nature, and so it shall never be done away. It is
nothing
negative, but a well-defined, living, almost acting picture of
goodness;
that kind of it which is human, but also divine. Read along with
it 1 John iv., from verse 7 to end; or, if you like, the whole epistle
of John and Mark xii. 28.
TO HIS WIFE.
23d June
1864.
Think what
God has determined
to do to all
those who [339] submit themselves to His righteousness and
are
willing to receive His gift. They are to be conformed to the image of
His
Son, and when that is fulfilled, and God sees that they are
conformed
to the image of Christ, there can be no more condemnation, for this is
the praise which God Himself gives, whose judgment is just. So we
ought always to hope in Christ, for as sure as we receive
Him now, so sure will we be made conformable to His image. Let us begin
by taking no thought about worldly cares, and setting
our minds on the righteousness of God and His kingdom, and then we
shall
have far clearer views about the worldly cares themselves, and we
shall be continually enabled to fight them under Him who
has
overcome the world.
TO HIS WIFE.
26th June
1864.
Note in (2
Cor.) ver. 10 that
the judgment
is according to what we have done, so that if we are to be
counted
righteous, we must really get righteousness and do it. Note also that
we
are to receive the things done in the body, not rewards or
punishments merely, but the things themselves are to be brought back to
us, and we must meet them in the spirit of Christ, who bore our
sins
and abolished them, or else we must be overwhelmed altogether.
. . . I have
come from Mr.
Baptist Noel. The
church was full to standing, and the whole service was as plain
as
large print. The exposition was the Parable of Talents, and the sermon
was on John iii. 16. The sermon was the text writ large,
nothing
ingenious or amusing, and hardly any attempt at instruction, but plain
and very serious exhortation from a man who evidently
believes
neither more nor less than what he says.
TO HIS WIFE.
28th June
1864.
I can always
have you with me
in my mind—why
should we not have our Lord always before us in our minds,
for
we have His life and character and mind far more clearly described than
we can know any one here? If we had seen Him in the
flesh
we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so well. Pray to
Him
for a constant sight of Him, for He is man that we may be
able
to look to Him, and God, so that He can create us
anew
in His own image.
