Sounding strings.

There is a place in experience where Christ’s voice sets the whole being vibrating.  The soul is so in tune with Him that the cadences of His tones fill the soul with a tremor of glee and gladness.  If you sing the scale in a room where there is a piano the corresponding strings of the instrument will sound.  Thus it is with Jesus and the sanctified soul.  When Christ speaks the heart answers spontaneously.

REGENERATION

Regeneration does much for us.  But there is that even in the heart of the regenerate which is antagonistic to Christ.  The whole man does not say instinctively, “Thy will be done”; yet there is something within to which the Lord can appeal.  Consult Peter.  He tells us of “exceeding great and precious promises by which we become partakers of the Divine nature.”  We “take a part” (partakers) of the divine Shekinah into our hearts.  We are not only “adopted” but born of God, and by a divine heredity we possess His character.

Samuel.

We see this beautifully illustrated in the case of Samuel.  Given in covenant to God from his birth, and early taught the word of the Lord, he possessed the changed heart and the attuned ear.  When God’s voice fell out of the skies that night something in Samuel heard what aged and mitred Eli could not hear.  Eli had the theory and reasoned out who the speaker must be, but the heart of Samuel awoke intuitively at the sound of that voice.

The voice from the sky.

As Jesus taught in the temple God spoke, and many whose ears were dull because their hearts were hard and unchanged said, “It thundered.”  Others saw that something extraordinary had occurred and admitted that “an angel spoke to Him.”  But the disciples whose “names were written in heaven,” and who had regenerated hearts, knew it was the voice of God.

The flinty world.

But while the child of God is in sympathy with God he must be sanctified wholly to be fully, constantly and completely responsive to Christ.  Jesus wants a bride who will live His life with Him and enter into all His plans and sorrows, ambitions and trials, aims and purposes.  There are many people who are glad Jesus died for them who know nothing about “suffering with Christ.”  Yet the Bible is filled with allusions to it.  The Heavenly Bridegroom wants a companion who will understand Him.  This cold, hard, flinty, wicked world does not.  “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.”  He knocked at the door of His own vineyard and the husband-men said, “Come, let us kill the Son.”  The divine Lord hungers for some one who will not misjudge His purposes nor impute to Him base motives.

The unappreciated.