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Today's Devotional

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God —Colossians 3:3 (ESV).

We all know how vain it is to try to tempt the dead to sin. Now, the Apostle says, “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts;” they are as dead men in their love and affection towards the things of the world. If we be united to Christ by a true and lively faith we shall not set our hearts upon present pleasures and possessions, but shall be ready to give up every thing which is inconsistent with our love of him and with the profession of the gospel. We take comfort to ourselves that Christ died for us, that we have part in his death; but it would he useful to try ourselves by this test: Do we find that we are dead to the animating spirit of the world, to its opinions, its tempers, its maxims? Then indeed we may believe that we have fellowship with Christ in his death; but if our minds are eager and lively in the desire of earthly good, whilst they are cold and sluggish towards spiritual interests, we are not partakers of Christ’s death, we have not a well-grounded hope of a better life. They whose hearts are glued to this world and its concerns would do well seriously to consider their state, and to seek, before it be too late, that higher happiness which neither fraud nor violence, nor Satan nor his instruments can take away. Some portion of happiness and spiritual comfort the believer already possesses in his own soul; but the rest is “hidden with God,” laid up till the day of recompense in the world to come.

About the author and the source

We often do not know what stories lie behind devotional books. In the case of Daily Readings, we have a hint. It was produced “in the hope of furnishing to the Inhabitants of two Villages in Northumberland, some counter-action against the moral evils arising from the temporary settlement of Railway Labourers in the immediate neighbourhood.”