The Yearnings of the New Nature - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2025

God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
1 John 5:11

The Yearnings of the New Nature
The child of God, in the normal, right state of his affections, looks on to the future, when all hindrance shall be abolished, and when he, spirit, soul, and body, shall be like the Lord in the liberty of the glory. He also yearns after the conscious favor of his God’s presence day by day, and longs to know more of Christ, and to live in His enjoyed communion until the glory comes. This, though varying in intensity, and though interrupted by the influences of the world, is true of everyone who has divine life, for, as the waters of one fountain, so do the desires of this life spring from God, their source. The measure of the desires may differ, and does differ, according to the practical godliness of each child; but the eternal life itself, as acted upon by the indwelling Spirit, rises up to the Father and the Son.

God gives desires after Himself to His people. The eternal life He has communicated to His children is unlike natural life, for that goes on independently of our parents from whom we derived it. Each human being has his own natural life in his own individuality; but the eternal life, while the possession of each believer, is immediately connected with its source and origin, God. It is not ours in ourselves apart from its source, but it is in the Son. “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.”

New affections, new motives, new longings pertain to this life, and all of these God sustains by His Spirit. The wandering, the turning aside, the “world-bordering” of the child of God—however dishonoring to the Father, and however sad in their results to the child of God himself—must not be confounded with the unchangeable truth of his having eternal life in Christ.

H. F. Witherby