August 20

I love my master: I will not go out free. - Exodus 21:5.

LOVE, as the principle of obedience, renders it perpetual. At the end of seven years, under the law, the bond-servant was allowed to go free; but if he refused to avail himself of the privilege, if he came to his master and said, “I love my master: I will not go out free,” then the master took him to the door, and bored his ear through, with an awl, to the door-post, signifying by this striking symbol that he was now a fixture, that he was now a domestic, and forever attached to the family. Our Saviour alludes to this custom when he says, “Lo, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me, Mine ears hast thou opened.” It is in the Hebrew and in the margin, “Mine ears hast thou bored;” as much as to say, “I am thine entirely: obedience is the course in which I am going to engage, and nothing shall make me swerve from it;” “Lo, I come;” “I delight to do thy will, O my God. Yea, thy law is within my heart.” He was, therefore, “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” He could say, “With desire have I desired to eat this passover with you, my disciples, before I suffer.” “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished?”

Herein the Saviour is an example to his people; they have the same mind in them which was also in him. They are, therefore, not detained in his service against their will. They are not impressed men. They are not conscripts, but they are volunteers. They have been “made willing in the day of his power.” While duty renders it our medicine, love renders it our meat, to do the will of our heavenly Father. We take the one, we relish and enjoy the other. Our Saviour, therefore, when many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him, said to the twelve, trying their dispositions, “Will ye also go away?” “Oh,” said Peter, in the name of the rest, “go away! to whom shall we go but unto thee? for thou hast the words of eternal life.”

It is sometimes said of Christians who hold certain doctrines, “They live as they list.” Nothing is more untrue and vile in the sense of their calumniators, who mean thereby that they do evil that good may come. But if they feel those doctrines which they profess, we will venture to affirm that nothing is more true in another sense, and that they do live as they list. They do observe the Sabbath; they “call it a delight, holy of the Lord, and honourable.” They do repair to the sanctuary, and they love to repair to it; they are glad when it is said unto them, “Let us go up unto the house of the Lord.” They do not find it their prison, but their palace, their home, their Father’s house; and they can individually say, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after:-that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”