Day 27 - A Ray of Colour

"Consider the lilies of the field," he says, "how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin." Jesus is trying to get us to think how free we can be in the kingdom - free from the weight of all the usual earthly worries and anxieties. Lilies do not struggle with life; they have no sense of anxiety or foreboding about anything at all; but they manage to grow all the same and they grow to be beautiful.

God paints the flower's petals with greater beauty than the robes of kings. If you would want to be beautiful in your soul, you need to rest in the Lord. Only a little struggling is enough to mar the whole.

Christ wants to reveal himself to the world through you. He will shine the beauty of his own wonderful person into your soul if you allow him to do so by being quiet. If you can let go of all concerns about the things of this life, then Jesus will clothe you with the beauties of heaven.

Our human character, as the years go by, becomes more and more revealed on our faces. The happy soul has a face full of laughter lines and the miser's thin face, for example, shows the pinched condition of his heart. In a similar fashion, Jesus will stamp his own image on your soul if your soul is kept quiet, and his image will flow out in beauty onto your face and into your visible life.

But you should not merely sit and wait for this ideal state to occur. Jesus did not mean, by this lesson of the lilies, to suggest that you do not have to pray. In fact you have to pray a great deal. If you do not keep praying, Satan will have you toiling and spinning soon enough!

The only way to quieten the soul is to keep very close to our Lord with a firm trust, and you cannot do it without a great deal of prayer. You must set out to put a stop to all this toiling and caring. Learn a lesson from the lilies. Stay quiet in the Lord, and he will change you more and more into an object of Christian beauty that will bless the world.

Even after you have long gone home, a peaceful and patient life like that will still be casting its rays of colour behind you, while you go on, and it will chase away the shadows from the lives of many others.