Morning By Morning #22

Son of man, how is the wood of a vine better than that of a branch on any of the trees in the forest?

Ezekiel 15:2

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

These words were meant to humble God’s people. They are called God’s vine, but in their own nature are they any better than others? Only through God’s goodness have they become fruitful, having been replanted in good soil. The Lord has trained His vine along the walls of His sanctuary and they produce fruit for His glory, but what are they without their God? What are they without the continual influence of the Spirit who is the source of their fruitfulness?

Dear believer, learn to reject pride, seeing there is no basis for it in you. Whoever you are or whatever you have become you have done nothing over which to be proud. The more you have the more you are in debt to God, and you should never be proud over something that causes you to be a debtor.

Consider your beginning—look back to what you were. Consider what you would have been without God’s divine grace. Then consider who you are now. If you are proud, doesn’t your own conscience rebuke you? Don’t your thousand past wanderings convict you, telling you that you are unworthy to be called His child? And if He has changed you, have you not been taught it is only His grace that has made you different?

O “great believer”! You would have been a great sinner if God had not made you different. And you who take such a courageous stand for truth, you would have been just as courageous for error if His grace had not taken hold of you.

Therefore, don’t be proud. Although you may have a large spiritual estate—a wide domain of grace—you don’t have even a single thing to call your own—except sin and misery.

Oh, what foolish infatuation to think that you, who has borrowed everything, should even think of exalting yourself! You are a poor dependent pensioner living on the generosity and riches of the Savior. You have a life that dies without the fresh streams of life flowing from Jesus.

And yet you are proud! Shame on you, O foolish heart!

From the pen of Jim Reimann:

It is a humbling exercise to consider the track of our lives before Christ saved us. Yet this is exactly what Paul encourages us to do in these verses:

Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.

It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.”

1 Corinthians 1:26 – 31

Father, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).