November 7 Daily Devotional

Thank God—He does not give us our deserts!

When we look to God and realize something of the truth about Him, and ourselves in relationship to Him, the one thing we are conscious of is that God never deals with us according to our deserts... [He] gives us His good things in spite of our being what we are. He does not merely look at us as we are. Were He to do so we should all be condemned.... But He is interested in us in spite of these externals: He sees us as a loving Father. He looks upon us in His grace and mercy. So He does not deal with us merely as we are. He deals with us in grace.

... ‘Now’, [Jesus] says in effect, ‘you deal like that with your fellow men. Do not merely see the offensive and the difficult and the ugly. See behind all that.’ Let us then observe human beings in their relationship to God, destined for eternity. Let us learn to look at them in this new way, in this divine way. ‘Look on them’, says Christ ... ‘as I have looked upon you, and in the light of the thing that brought Me from heaven for you, to give My life for you.’ Look at them like that. The moment you do so you will find that it is not difficult to implement the golden rule, because at that point you are delivered from self and its terrible tyranny, and you are seeing men and women with a new eye and in a different way ... a spiritual way. It is only when we come to this, after having started with God and sin and self and others, that we shall indeed be able to implement this amazing summary of the law and the prophets: ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ That is the thing to which we are called in Christ Jesus. We are to implement it, we are to practise it. And as we do so we shall be showing the world the only way in which its problems can be solved. We shall at the same time be missionaries and ambassadors for Christ.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 215-16