November 18 Daily Devotional

Naught for your comfort—save Christ

What hope has the man who is not a Christian? Look at your world; read your newspaper. What can you bank upon? Fifty years ago they used to bank on the fact that man was rapidly improving and getting better. You cannot do that now. You cannot bank on education; you cannot bank on the United Nations any more than you could on the League of Nations. All that has been tried and failed. What hope is there for the world? There is none. There is no comfort for the world now. But for the Christian man who mourns because of sin and because of the state of the world, there is this comfort— the comfort of the blessed hope, the glory that yet remains. So that even here, though he is groaning, he is happy at the same time because of the hope that is set before him. There is this ultimate hope in eternity. In that eternal state we shall be wholly and entirely blessed, there will be nothing to mar life, nothing to detract from it, nothing to spoil it. Sorrow and sighing shall be no more; all tears shall be wiped away; and we shall bask for ever and ever in the eternal sunshine, and experience joy and bliss and glory unmixed and unspoiled. ‘Happy are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’ How true it is. Unless we know that, we are not Christian. If we are Christian, we do know it, this joy of sins forgiven and the knowledge of it; the joy of reconciliation; the joy of knowing that God takes us back when we have fallen away from Him; the joy and contemplation of the glory that is set before us; the joy that comes from anticipation of the eternal state.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 61–2