A Devotional for
September 25
From the Pen of John Bunyan
"Love to God is Kindness to Him"
“Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, ‘Thus says the LORD, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness in a land not sown’”
Jeremiah 2: 2.
Love to God . . . is more seen in desires than in any Christian act. Do you think that the woman with her two mites cast in all that she desired to cast into the treasury of God? Or do you think when David said that he had prepared for the house of God with all his might, that his desires stinted [restricted] when his ability was at its utmost? (1 Chronicles 29). No, no; desires go beyond all actions. Therefore, I said it is the desires of a man that are reckoned for his kindness. Kindness is that which God will not forget. I mean the kindness which his people show to him, especially in their desires to serve him in the world. When Israel was come out of Egypt, you know how many stumbles they had before they got to Canaan.
But forasmuch as they were willing or desirous to follow God, he passes by all their failures, saying, “I remember thee,” and that almost a thousand years after, “the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown” (Jeremiah 2: 2). Israel was holiness to the Lord and the first fruits of his increase. There is nothing that God likes of ours better than he likes our true desires. For indeed true desires they are the smoke of our incense, the flower of our graces, and the very vital part of our new man. They are our desires that ascend, and they that are the sweet of all the sacrifices that we offer to God. The man of desires is the man of kindness.
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