Waiting for the Lord and Christian Character - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2024

Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning.
Luke 12:35 NKJV

Waiting for the Lord and Christian Character
That is your character as Christians: you are to be like people that are waiting, the Master of the house has gone to a wedding, you do not know what time He will return. Death is not my lord; Christ is my Lord; “Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching” (Lk. 12:37). Watching: those are the people that are blessed when Christ comes—the affections of the bride—they are watching for the Lord.

“Blessed are those servants,” their character is “like men who wait.” Mark the consequence, it is most blessed: Christ has become a man and taken the form of a servant; He never gives it up. It is a figure of course; being a servant, now He serves us, washing our feet, but in heaven He will be our servant to minister all blessing and joy. As I have so often said, selfishness likes to be served, love likes to serve. Just like a mother with a sick child, she will not let anyone else attend to it; her heart is there.

You must have your lamps burning: that is the character you should have. Christ says, when I get you at home, I shall make you sit down to food. It is a figure; I will spread the table in heaven for you if I find you watching.

There I get the character of Christians: they are to be as men who wait till their Lord shall return; then, when Christ has everything His own way, He makes them to sit down to meat and comes forth and serves them. Next every man receives his own reward according to his own labor, that is, He makes us rulers: “If we endure, we shall also reign with Him” (2 Tim. 2:12). Thus what the Spirit of God puts before us as the hope is that Christ Himself will come and bring us into this—the fruit of God’s own love—with the constant expression of it on the way, in the intimacy of friendship.

-- J. N. Darby