Encouragement for Today

I read something today that was very encouraging and uplifting and wanted to share it with each of you. My wife and I are reading “Our Lord Prays for His Own” by Marcus Rainsford, published by Moody Press in 1950 . I have included excerpts several times in this blog. Today’s reading was very interesting and encouraging I thought. I’m going to paraphrase his thoughts since the original is somewhat difficult to work through. This is from pages 201-202.

The author is discussing Jesus’ prayer for his people and is particularly focusing on the phrase, “I kept them in thy name.”

So with apologies to Marcus Rainsford, here’s my rendition:

One principal way in which our precious Savior kept His people “in His name,” is by allowing them to learn in their daily experience all the many varieties of their needs. While he is doing that, he is demonstrating there is no need or even partial need for which there is not an abundant supply of help from the fullness and faithfulness of their God. In this way they are kept in a way so that they remain humble while Christ is glorified and all the praise goes to Him. It is very difficult and humbling to our pride to have God deal with us this way, but it is the way the Son of God kept His disciples, and it is the way our heavenly Father keeps us now.

We are often very much distressed by supposing, perhaps correctly, that there is something in us, some temptation or response to life that causes us to doubt we are Christians. We sometimes think we have a trial or temptation which we are not aware of anyone else having, and knowing that we are assaulted and sometimes fall before temptations which we never heard or read of in the experience of any other Christian. We stagger in unbelief, we write bitter things against ourselves almost to the point of letting go altogether.

Now, there is not a single sample of fallen humanity, there is not a phase of human weakness, there not any imaginable illustration of human depravity or ruin that there is not a remedy for in the Lord Jesus Christ. And God uses those remedies as a declaration of the glory of Christ and the Father. Suppose I am a part of the Church, suppose I have a makeup like no one else, suppose the history of my experience is unlike that of any other Christian. Suppose my temptation is unusual and my trial unparalleled in the history of Christianity. It’s necessary for there to be cases like mine in order to show the glory of God, that there is a provision in Christ’s fullness for such a case as mine. I might as well be that individual as any one else. Would it be better if you and I changed places? What I want to learn is that there is in the name of my Christ that which meets my need, and that there is in “the fountain open for sin and uncleanness,” that which has washed away my guilt. As a result, my song will be the loudest when the chorus of the redeemed singers sing His praises, because my need was the greatest.