Category: Devotion of the Day

DOUBLE ABUNDANCE

God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.
II Corinthians 9:8

God’s grace is not only amazing grace, it is abounding grace. He abounds toward us that we may abound toward Him There is abundance of grace in order that there may be abundance of good works. “Always having all sufficiency in all things” – what could be more satisfying than that? It is another way of saying, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” There is nothing stingy and niggardly about the grace of God. “Of his fullness have all we received and grace upon grace.” Jesus came that we might have life more abundantly.

And as God abounds toward us, we should abound toward Him. Paul was a great example of what he wrote. With all his infirmities, his thorn in the flesh, his opposition and persecution, who ever abounded to every good work as he did?

Our penurious and miserly service today declares that we live cheaply in our souls. We do not lay hold of the riches of grace in Christ Jesus. Our output is small because our intake is small. “My God shall supply all your need,” and beyond that do more for us than we can ask or think.

Let us be doubly abundant, in grace and good works.

SECOND CHILDHOOD

Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3

The crying need with most of us is not so much to learn more as to unlearn much of what we already know. We know too much. We are cluttered with a mental attic full of things we have read and heard, and now we need to get through – not back – to a few elementary simplicities. There is a second childhood, not of childishness but of childlikeness. To reach it requires a conversion, maybe a sort of second conversion with some of us, when we become just simple Christians content to trust and obey. Some great scholars as well as plain souls reach it. It is not a peak so high that only a few rarely endowed climbers can scale it; it is a valley so low that only a few will humble themselves to walk in it. We are straining too hard trying to be profound and deep to let go and be children again in spirit. And we get there heart first, not head first.