• 
• 
• 
• 

Today's Devotional

It came about the same night that the word of God came to Nathan, saying, “Go and tell David my servant, ‘Thus says the LORD, “You shall not build a house for Me to dwell in .… Moreover, I tell you that the Lord will build a house for you” —1 Chronicles 17:3, 10.

He who gives to God receives from God immeasurably more than he gives. David would willingly have built for his Lord a house of cedar; and in response his Lord builds for him an everlasting house. Full measure pressed down and running over, the heavenly King returns to the earthly servant. For that which is temporary, that which is age-long and everlasting. For that which is local and national, that which is world-wide. For that which is tainted and marred, that which is as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heaven for clearness. For the Temple in Jerusalem, the better Temple of Christ’s body.

Have I not felt it too?

I give God my heart, the nest of many a hateful bird, unfitted to be his shrine. I receive it back, washed and justified and sanctified, in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of omnipotent grace.

I give God my life, cramped and meager at the best, weakened still further by my sin, an example to others of evil. He restores it dignified, gladdened, with opportunities opening before it on every side.

I give God my means, no more perhaps than the widow’s two mites, or than the Galilean boy’s bread and fish. And he multiplies my offering, transmutes it, uses it for the most marvelous and glorious ends.

Thus the more I cast away, at his feet, in his service, the more I have. I yield him my wood and hay and stubble, and he repays me with his gold and silver and precious stones.

About the author and the source

It is for his book Men of the Covenant (the story of the martyred Scottish Covenanters) that Alexander Smellie (1857–1923) is remembered today. Nonetheless, his devotional Hour of Silence was so popular in its own day it had to be reprinted eight times in twenty-four years. He was a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland and an editor and contributor to Christian magazines.