| Finding the Way |
Chapter 16 |
Page 3 |
There was not a moment in all our Lord’s life when there was the slightest bitterness of feeling in His breast. No resentment ever found an instant’s lodgment in His heart. His answer to all the unkindness, the enmity, the plotting, the denials, the treason, and to all the cruelty, the brutal accusations, and the terrible wrongs inflicted upon Him, was – love. Thus it is that we should bear all that is unjust, unkind and wrong in the treatment that we receive from others. We are to keep love in our hearts through it all. A summer tourist writes of a spring as sweet as any that ever gushed from the sunny hillsides, which one day he found by the sea, when the tide ebbed away. Then the sea rolled in and poured its bitter floods over the little spring, hiding it out of sight, wrapping it in a shroud of brackish waters. But when the tide ebbed away again the spring was still pouring up its sweet stream, with no taste of the sea’s bitterness in it. Such a spring should the love in our hearts be. Though floods of unkindness and of wrong pour over us, however cruelly we may be treated by the world, and whatever unkindness or injustice we may have to endure from others, the well of love in our bosom should never retain a trace of the bitterness, but should be always sweet.
The world cannot harm us if we thus live. The things that hurt and scar our lives are resentment, unforgivingness, bitter feeling, and desire for revenge. Men may beat us until all our bones are broken, but if love fails not in our hearts meanwhile, we have come through the experience unharmed, with no marks of injury upon us. One writing of a friend who was dreadfully hurt in a runaway accident says that the woman will be probably scarred for life, and then goes on to speak of the wondrous patience in her suffering and of the peace of God that failed not in her heart for a moment. The world may hurt our bodies, but if we suffer as Christ suffered there will be no trace of scarring or wounding in our inner life.
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