Jeremiah 26:6.
The question, I apprehend, which is troubling many minds now, is suggested in this denunciation of the prophet Jeremiah. The breaking up of formal unity, the breaking up of a testimony really coming in great measure from God troubles saints. They are not prepared for it. They count it a strange thing. … How unaccountable, doubtless, has it often appeared to many souls, that God can so let His Name be dishonoured by His own people, who should testify for Him. And yet so it is. God would rather give up His own glory for the present, and give up his strength into captivity, in the words of Psalm 78:61, than His children should go unrebuked, and suffer damage. He loves their profit better than His own present glory, though all will finally be for His glory.
Our standing is simply and entirely that of faith. We have no other. We are Gentiles — the wild olive tree. The moment that we begin to think that we have a standing-place, apart from faith, we forget the fundamental principles of our calling. "Thou standest by faith," Paul said at the first to the church. And so the first word that Jesus said to the church, when He came to visit it at Ephesus, and found it declining from first love, was, "Repent, and do the first works, or else I will come unto thee quickly, and remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent." The candlestick, the glory, could not stand apart from faith. … However free we may be, by grace, from the present condemnation of such truth, still the lesson will surely be of little value to us, if we affix it upon others and neglect to apply it to ourselves.
Abergele. 1850.
Waiting for God's Son from Heaven.
I do not think much of an uncomfortable inn if I know that I am only there for two or three days on the way. I might perhaps wish it were better, but I do not trouble myself much about it, because I am not living there. I am not living in this world, I am dying here; if there is a bit of the old life, it has to be put to death. My life is hid with Christ in God. I am waiting for the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ — waiting for God's Son from heaven, Who is going to take us there, to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, that fadeth not away.
J. N. Darby.