We proclaim to you what we
have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our
fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:3
Nothing twists and deforms the human soul more than a low
or unworthy conception of God and His kindness.
To a Pharisee in the days of Christ, the service of God
was a bondage which he did not love but from which he could not escape without
a loss too great to bear.
The God of the Pharisees was not a God easy to live with,
so his religion became grim and hard and loveless. It had to be so, for our
notion of God must always determine the quality of our religion.
Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has
also been grim and severe. And the cause has been the same—an unworthy or an
inadequate view of God.
Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is
conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be.
From a failure properly to understand God comes a world
of unhappiness among good Christians even today. The Christian life is thought
to be a glum, unrelieved cross-carrying under the eye of a stern Father who
expects much and excuses nothing—a God austere, peevish, highly temperamental
and extremely hard to please!
The kind of life which springs out of such libelous
notions must of necessity be but a parody on the true life in Christ.
The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings
and His service one of unspeakable pleasure. Those who trust Him have found His
mercy always in triumph over justice, through the blood of the everlasting
covenant!
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