| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 21 |
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In the wasting of the marble under the chisel the image grows more and more into the beauty of the sculptor’s thought. When God’s will cuts away our cherished things we know it is well, and that we are being fashioned into the beauty of the divine thought for us.
What is the heavenly pattern after which our lives are to be fashioned? Can we know what we are to be? We get the answer in what God has given us as the rule of our life – his law.
The divine law is summed up in one word – love. “Thou shalt love.” God is love. “As it is in heaven” means love wrought out in all pure, beautiful, holy life. “Thy will be done on earth” means therefore love in all earthly life. All the lessons may be gathered into one – learning to love. Loving God is first. Then loving God begets in us love to all people; for, as George MacDonald says, “When God comes to man, man looks round for his neighbor.” We cannot have the love of God in our heart and not love our fellow-men.
If, then, we know what love really is, we can readily find our pattern for life “as it is in heaven.” What is love? We have a portrait of it in St. Paul’s wonderful thirteenth of First Corinthians.
“Love suffereth long and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away.”
Then we see the perfect incarnation of this vision of love in our blessed Lord’s human life, as portrayed for us in the Gospels. “As it is in heaven” is like Christ.
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