Our relationship to Christ must be intensely personal. If it is not, the deepest longings of our soul can never be satisfied. Augustine prayed long ago, "0 God, Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts can know no rest till they rest in Thee." It is the personal contact with the Lord Jesus that will cause us to grow in Him. No one can thrive spiritually on mere church membership, sacraments, ritual, or formality. Stained glass windows and soft music, beautiful and permissible as they may be, will cause a soul to forget itself for a moment, and will lift the soul up aesthetically, but they cannot feed the soul that is hungry.
There are different kinds of judges. In our day the word has only one meaning—one who rules in a court and decides the merits of a case in accordance with the points of law that are involved. In the Word of God there is another type of judge. In the Book of Judges, the Hebrew word translated judge means to put right and then rule. The world is in need of this type of judge.
God is with us; God is for us; God is in us. If we understand the nature of these prepositions we shall grow indeed in the graces of Christ. The very name of our Lord Jesus was Immanuel. God with us (Isa. 8:10; Matt. 1:23). The meaning of the incarnation is that the Lord came to us from Heaven, the Word being made flesh to "dwell among us." "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way" (Isa. 53:6). This disobedience caused the loneliness that characterizes man and highlights his greatest need. But suddenly, Christ came, and God was with us.
A well-known biologist spent his whole life studying a beetle. To the one who knows little about these things it seems impossible that there should be enough in such a tiny animal to occupy a brilliant mind for a lifetime. But when this man had come to almost the end of his lifetime of study, he stated that he had made a mistake in taking a beetle as his unit of study, that he should have confined himself to the wing of a beetle!
No small part of God's plan is the triumph of individual righteousness during the present lifetime on earth, in the midst of all the surrounding unrighteousness. God purposes to bring righteousness into life so that it shall be the dominating characteristic in the believer. We were "created in Christ Jesus unto good works wherein God hath before ordained that we should walk" (Eph. 2:10).
