December 2

Twentieth Monday after Trinity

Redeeming the time. Ephesians 5:16.

THE will of God was the first cause of our redemption; the atoning death of Jesus its means. Such then was the value of free obedience in the sight of God, that in the priceless sufferings of the God-man Christ Jesus, our Redeemer, obedience entered as a primary condition of their value. And yet it is on this very side that He, our Saviour, sets Himself forth as our Example. Not in His power, but in His moral Being, His humility, His love, His obedience, does He give Himself to copy, "that as He was, so should we be, in this world." What is said of Him our Head, may, in Him and through His grace, be said in our measure of us, His members. He speaketh of us in Himself; and we in Him may say, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O my God: Thy law is within my heart." We, too, as members of Him, have been sent into the world to accomplish in ourselves, and to discharge, in the order of His creation, a certain will of God, and in the knowledge and accomplishment of that will lies our salvation, and the secret of our predestination. Therefore redeem the time. Human society, in God's Hand, is not its own end, but a means for forming each soul of man, amid and through the trials incident to its daily tasks, for the perfection of its being.

So should we live, that every hour May die as dies the natural flower, A self-reviving thing of power;

That every thought and every deed May hold within itself the seed Of future good and future meed.

Y