| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 9 |
Page 6 |
When Raphael was asked the secret of his marvelous work, he said, “I feel the spirit of my mother bending over me when I paint.” When we ask why a Christian can do impossible things, it is because the Spirit of Christ is bending over him. A Christian in himself is only a man of common mould. He has no more wisdom, strength, or goodness than any other man. He has all the frailties, the infirmities, the imperfections, and faults of other men. But a Christian is a common man plus Jesus Christ. Christ has added himself to him – his strength, his goodness, his love, his divine life. A Christian is a man with God.
In the later days of Grecian art a prize was offered for the best statue of one of the goddesses. A youth in the country who loved this goddess set to work to compete for the prize. But he lacked the artist’s gift and experience, and his statue was crude and clumsy, far from beautiful. It seemed to have no chance at all for winning the prize. But the goddess, so the heathen legend runs, knowing of the sincere devotion of this youth to her and his love for her, when the time came for the display of the statues in the competition, entered herself into the crude stone, and at once it glowed with divine beauty, by far the most beautiful of all the statues, winning the prize.
We are called to show the world the beauty of Christ, to reproduce the glory of his life, not in cold marble, but in Christian character, in Christian spirit, in Christian service. In our weakness and faultiness it may seem to us that we cannot do anything, that our life and work are unworthy of the holy name we bear. Our best seems most unlovely, crude, faulty, and imperfect; but if we truly love Christ, if we truly believe on him, and if at his command we strive to do that which seems impossible, Christ himself, knowing our love, and seeing our striving, will enter into our life and fill it with himself. Then our poor efforts will become radiant and divine in their beauty. Able to do nothing worthy in ourselves, when Christ adds his own blessed life to ours we shall have power to do the things that are impossible.
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