For a Joyful Resurrection
“A-wake and sing, ye that d-well in dust.” — Is. xxvi. 19.
GRAciors God, Thou hast again dispersed the darkness of another natural night. Every rising earthly sun is bringing me nearer the gladdening day-break of immortality. O grant that, when the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, I may be ready to listen undismayed to the summons, “Behold, the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet Him.”
My prayer is, that I may now be made partaker of the blessedness of the first resurrection from a death of sin. As one “alive from the dead,” may I rise and walk with a living
Saviour “in newness of life,” that thus I may at last share also in the more glorious resurrection of His ransomed saints, when His “dead men shall live,” and together with His body “they shall arise,” obeying the joyous mandate of their risen Head, “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust.”
Blessed Jesus, I do rejoice to think of Thine own triumphant rising from the tomb. I rejoice to be able to visit in thought Thy vacant sepulchre, and to hear the glad tidings, “He is not here. He is risen!” “The Lord is risen!” — it is the blessed pledge and earnest of my own redemption from the power of the grave — that “because Christ lives, I shall live also.” O may “my life be now hid with Christ in God, so that when Christ, who is my life, shall appear, I may also appear with Him in glory.” Keep me ever in the frame I should wish to be found in when my Lord Cometh. May the lamp of faith and love be ever brightly burning. May it never be mine to be awoke, by the midnight cry, to the awful consciousness, “My lamp has gone out.”
May I rather be among the number of ‘’ waiting servants,” who, when their Lord “cometh and knocketh,” are ready to “• open unto Him immediately.”
Do Thou impart to all near and dear to me this day the same spiritual and eternal blessings I ask for myself. May they, too, be united to Jesus — “planted in the likeness of His death,” that they may be found also “in the likeness of His resurrection.” May we all seek to bear an increasingly holy resemblance in love one to another, and to our great living Head, in whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named; and if for a little while separated by death, may we, on the great day of His appearing, be reunited in bonds that shall know no dissolution.
Hasten that blessed time when our world, 80 long groaning and travailing in pain, shall put on her resurrection attire, and exult in the glorious liberty of Thy children. “Come, Lord Jesus: come quickly.” ““Why tarry the wheels of Thy chariot?”
Lord, I commend myself to Thee. Prepare me for living, prepare me for dying. Let me live near Thee in grace now, that I may live with Thee in glory everlasting. Let me be reconciled submissively to endure all that Thy sovereign wisdom and love see meet to appoint — looking forward, through the tears and sorrows of a weeping world, to that better day-spring, when “I shall behold Thy face in righteousness,” and be “satisfied, when I awake, in Thy likeness.” And all I ask is for the Redeemer’s sake. Amen.
“CAUSE ME TO HEAB THY LOVING-KINDNESS IN THE MORNING, FOR IN THEE DO I TRUST.”