November 10 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading

Isaiah 40:9–11

Devotional

Our knowledge of Christ is rather like climbing one of our Welsh mountains. When you’re at the base you see very little. The mountain itself looks about half as high as it really is. Confined in a little valley, you notice hardly anything except the rippling brooks as they descend into the stream at the foot of the mountain. Climb the first rising knoll, and the valley lengthens and widens beneath your feet. Go higher, and you see the country for four or five miles round, and you are delighted with the widening prospect. Keep climbing, and the scene keeps enlarging until at last, when you are on the summit and look east, west, north, and south, you see almost all England lying before you. Over there is a forest in some distant county, perhaps two hundred miles away. And here is the sea. And there is a shining river and the smoking chimneys of a manufacturing town, or the masts of the ships in a busy port. All these things please and delight you, and you say, “I could not have imagined that so much could be seen at this elevation.”

Now, the Christian life is like that. When we first believe in Christ we see only a little of him. The higher we climb the more we discover of his beauties. But who has ever reached the summit? Who has known all the heights and depths of the love of Christ which passes knowledge? When Paul was grown old, sitting grey-haired, shivering in a dungeon in Rome, he could say with greater emphasis than we can, “I know whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). Each experience had been like the climbing of a hill. Each trial had been like ascending another summit. And his death seemed like reaching the top of the mountain from which he could see all the faithfulness and love of him to whom he had committed his soul.

Go up, dear friend, on the high mountain.

[June 25]

Extracted from C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (public domain), language modernized by Larry E. Wilson.