Simpson Devotional
Inspirational Readings by A.B. Simpson
Simpson Devotional - Sunday, February 05, 2012
In the old creation, the week began with work and ended with Sabbath rest. The resurrection week begins with the first day-first rest, then labor. So we must first cease from our own works as God did from His, and enter into His rest. And then, with rested hearts, we will work His works with effectual power. But why labor to enter into rest? See that sailing craft-how restfully it glides over the waters, its canvas swelling with the wind and borne without an effort! And yet, look at that man at the helm. See how firmly he holds the rudder, bearing against the wind, and holding her steady to her position. Let him for a moment relax his steady hold and the vessel will fall listlessly along the wind. The sails will flap, the waves will toss the craft at their will, and all rest and power will have gone. It is the fixed helm that brings the steadying power of the wind. And so He has said, Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee (Isaiah 26:3). The steady will and stayed heart are ours. The keeping is the Lord's. So let us labor to enter and abide in His rest.
Posted on 5 February 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Saturday, February 04, 2012
This living Christ is not the person who was, but the person who still is your living Lord. At Preston Pans, near Edinburgh, I looked on the field where, long ago, armies had been engaged in contest. In the crisis of the battle the chieftain fell wounded. When they saw their leader's form go down, his men were about to shrink away from the field. Their strong hands held the claymore with trembling grip, and they faltered for a moment. Then the old chieftain rallied strength enough to rise on his elbow and cry: "I am not dead, my children, I am only watching you-to see my clansmen do their duty." And so from the other side of Calvary our Savior is speaking. We cannot see Him, but He says, Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20). Notice how He puts it: "I am"-an uninterrupted and continuous presence. Not "I will be," but the guarantee of an unbroken presence to remain with us forever. Soon the conflict shall be done, Soon the battle shall be won; Soon shall wave the victor's palm, Soon shall sing the eternal psalm. Then our joyful song shall be, I have overcome through Thee.
Posted on 4 February 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Friday, February 03, 2012
This is true faith. When we can see, it is not faith but reasoning. In crossing the Atlantic by ship, I observed this very principle of faith. We could see no path upon the water or sign of the shore. And yet day by day the helmsman was in a path as exactly as if he had been following a great chalk line upon the sea. And when we came within 20 miles of land he knew where we were as surely as if he had seen it all 3,000 miles ahead. How had we measured and marked our course? Day by day our captain had taken his instruments, and looking up to the sky had fixed his course by the sun. He was sailing by the heavenly lights, not the earthly lights. So faith looks up and sails on, by God's great Sun, not seeing one shoreline or earthly lighthouse or path upon the way. Often our steps seem to lead into utter uncertainty or even darkness and disaster. But He opens the way, making our midnight hours the very gates of day. Let us go forth this day, not knowing, yet trusting.
Posted on 3 February 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Thursday, February 02, 2012
The first word here used for service is diakanos, which means minister to others in any usual way or work. The word doulos, however, means a bondservant, and the Lord here plainly teaches us that this is the highest form of service. Christ made himself the servant of all, and he who would come nearest to Him and stand closest to Him at last must likewise learn the spirit of the ministry that has utterly renounced selfish rights and claims forever. It is quite possible for us to be entirely loyal to the Lord Jesus, and yet for His sake to be servants and under the authority of those who are over us in the Lord. The doulos spirit is the spirit of self-renunciation and glad submission to proper authority-service utterly disinterested, yielding its own preferences and interests unreservedly for the glory of the Master and the sake of our brethren. Lord, clothe us with such humility and make us wholly Thine.
Posted on 2 February 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Wednesday, February 01, 2012
In the life overflowing in service for others we find God's deep fountain spilling over the spring to find outlet in rivers of living water that bless and save the world around us. It is beautiful to notice that as the blessing grows unselfish it grows larger. The water in the heart is only a well, but when reaching out to the needs of others it is not only a river but a delta of many rivers overflowing in majestic blessing. This overflowing love is connected with the person and work of the Holy Spirit who was poured out upon the disciples after Jesus was glorified. This is the true secret of power for service-the heart filled and satisfied with Jesus and so baptized with the Holy Spirit that it is impelled by the fullness of its joy and love to impart to others what it has so abundantly received. And yet each new ministry only makes room for a new filling and a deeper receiving of the life which grows by giving. Letting go is twice possessing. Would you double every blessing? Pass it on.
Posted on 1 February 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Tuesday, January 31, 2012
More and more we are realizing the supreme importance of getting the right conception of sanctification-not as a blessing but as a personal union with the personal Savior and the indwelling Holy Spirit. Thousands of people get stranded after they have embarked on the great voyage of holiness. They find themselves failing and falling and are astonished and perplexed. They conclude that they must have been mistaken in their experience. So they make a new attempt at the same thing and again fall. At last, worn out with their efforts, they conclude that the experience is a delusion, or at least that it was never intended for them. Then they fall back into the old way, and their last state is worse than their first. What people need today to satisfy their deep hunger and to give them a permanent and divine experience is to know not sanctification as a state but Christ as a living person who is waiting to enter the heart that is willing to receive Him.
Posted on 31 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Monday, January 30, 2012
How did God bring about the miracle of the Red Sea? By shutting His people in on every side so that there was no way out but the divine way. The Egyptians were behind them, the sea was in front of them, the mountains were on both sides of them. There was no escape but from above. Someone has said that the devil can wall us in, but he cannot roof us over. We can always get out at the top. Our difficulties are but God's challenges, and many times He makes them so hard that we must get above them or go under. In the Providence of God, such an hour furnishes us with the highest possibilities for faith. We are pushed by the very emergency into God's best. Beloved, this is God's hour. If you will rise to meet it you will get such a hold upon Him that you will never be in extremities again; or if you are, you will learn to call them not extremities, but opportunities. Like Jacob, you will go forth from that night at Peniel, no longer Jacob, but victorious Israel. Let us bring to Him our need and prove Him true.
Posted on 30 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Sunday, January 29, 2012
Nehemiah gives us a graphic picture concerning what took place during the celebration of their glorious Feast of Tabernacles. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions to them for whom nothing is prepared . . . neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength. How many there are on every side for whom nothing is prepared! Let us find some sad and needy heart whom there is no one else to think of or care for. Let us pray for someone who has none to pray for him. Let us be like Him who, one Christmas Day, came to a world that would not appreciate Him, to be rejected and finally murdered. Let us not be afraid to know something even of the love that is unrequited and is thrown away on the unworthy. That is the love of Christ, and God has for such love a rich recompense. How Christ must weep over the selfishness that meets Him from those for whom He died!
Posted on 29 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Saturday, January 28, 2012
There is a joy that springs spontaneously in the heart without any external or even rational cause. It is like an artesian fountain. It rejoices because it cannot help it. It is the glory of God; it is the heart of Christ; it is the joy divine of which He says, These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full (John 15:11). And your joy no man can take from you. Those who possess this fountain are not discouraged by surrounding circumstances. Rather, they are often surprised at the deep, sweet gladness that comes without apparent cause-a joy that frequently is strongest when everything in their condition and circumstances would tend to fill them with sorrow and depression. It is the nightingale in the heart that sings at night because it is its nature to sing. It is the glorified and incorruptible joy that belongs with heaven and anticipates already the everlasting song. Lord, give us Thy joy under all circumstances this day, and let our full hearts overflow in blessing to others.
Posted on 28 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Friday, January 27, 2012
0ne of Satan's favorite employees is the switchman. He likes nothing better than to sidetrack one of God's express trains sent on some blessed mission and filled with the fire of a holy purpose. Something will come up in the pathway of the earnest man to attract his attention and occupy his strength and thought. Sometimes it is a little irritation or provocation. Sometimes it is some petty grievance he stops to pursue or adjust. Sometimes it is somebody else's business in which he becomes interested, and he feels bound to rectify. Before he knows it, he is absorbed in many distracting cares and interests that turn him aside from the great purpose of his life. Perhaps he does not do much harm, but he has missed his connection. He has left the main line. Let all these things alone. Let grievances come and go, but press forward steadily and irresistibly, crying as you speed toward the goal, This one thing I do!
Posted on 27 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Thursday, January 26, 2012
Raising rice in the Orient is a beautiful process. The rice is sown on a morass of mud and water ploughed up by great buffaloes. After a few weeks the pale green shoots spring up, appearing above the water. The seed has been sown very thickly and the plants are clustered together in great numbers. The farmer can pull up a score in a single handful. At that point the shoots are ready for transplanting. So God first plants us and lets us grow very close to some of His children. We may be in great clusters in the nursery or the hothouse. But when we reach a certain stage we must be transplanted or come to nothing. God calls us out by His Spirit and Providence into situations where we have to lean directly on Him. He puts upon us a weight of responsibility so great that we are thrown upon the limitless resources of His grace and have an opportunity to develop. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river (Jeremiah 17:7-8).
Posted on 26 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Wednesday, January 25, 2012
It is good to be able to receive new truth and blessing without sacrificing the truths already proved or abandoning foundations already laid. Some persons are always laying the foundations, until, finally, they appear like a number of abandoned sites and half-constructed buildings. Nothing is ever brought to completion. If today you are abandoning for some new truth the things that a year ago you counted most precious and believed to be divinely true, this should be sufficient evidence that a year from now you will probably abandon your present convictions for the next new light that comes to you. God wants to continually add to us, to develop us, to enlarge us, to teach us more and more but always building on what He has already taught us and what He has established in our lives. While we are to prove all things, let us hold fast that which is good, and whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing (Philippians 3:16).
Posted on 25 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Tuesday, January 24, 2012
When God does anything marked and special for our souls or bodies, He intends it as a sacred trust for us to communicate to others. Freely ye have received, freely give. It has pleased the Master in these closing days of His dispensation of grace to reveal Himself in peculiar blessing to the hearts of His chosen disciples in all parts of the Christian church. But this is intended to be communicated to a still wider circle. Every one of us who has been brought into these intimate relations with God becomes a trustee or witness for these higher truths to everyone we can influence. If God has revealed Himself to us as our Sanctifier, it is that we may help others to Him as a Sanctifier. If He has become our Healer, it is because there are sick and suffering people to whom we can bring some blessing. In like manner, if the hope of the Lord's coming has become precious to us, it would be worse than ingratitude for us to hide our testimony to this truth and hold it only for our own personal comfort.
Posted on 24 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Monday, January 23, 2012
It is a great deliverance to lose one's self. There is no heavier millstone than self-consciousness. It is so easy to become introverted and coiled around ourselves in our spiritual consciousness. There is nothing that is so easy to fasten onto as our misery: there is nothing that is more apt to produce self-consciousness than suffering. Then it becomes almost a settled habit to hold onto our burden and pray it unceasingly into the very face of God until even our prayer saturates us with our own misery. Rather, we should ask for power to drop ourselves altogether and leave ourselves in His loving hands and know that we are free. Then we may rise into the blessed liberty of His higher thoughts and will and demonstrate His love and care for others. The very act of letting go of ourselves lifts us into a higher place and relieves us from the thing that is hurting. This habit of prayer for others, and especially for the world, brings its own recompense and leaves upon our hearts a blessing, like the fertility which the Nile deposits upon the soil of Egypt as it flows through to its ultimate goal.
Posted on 23 January 2012 | 9:00 am
Simpson Devotional - Sunday, January 22, 2012
There is danger of becoming morbid even in preparing for the Lord's coming. I remember a time when I determined to devote myself to a month of waiting upon the Lord for a baptism of the Holy Ghost. Before the end of the month the Lord had shaken me out of the seclusion and compelled me to go out and carry His message to others. As I went He met me in my service to Him. There is a musty, monkish way of seeking a blessing. There is also a wholesome, practical holiness which finds us in the company of the Lord Himself, not only in the closet and on the mountaintop of prayer but among publicans and sinners and in the practical duties of life. The practical preparation for the Lord's coming consists first of fully entering into fellowship with Him in our own spiritual lives, letting Him not only cleanse us, but perfect us in all the finer touches of the Spirit's deeper work. Following that it will mean getting out of ourselves and living for the benefit of others and the preparation of the world for His appearing.
Posted on 22 January 2012 | 9:00 am