Psalm 96:8-9 Give to the LORD the glory due to his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.… Why do we think that nature is beautiful? Because it is the external world formed by the same hand that made us. We, partakers of the likeness of God, naturally admire our Father's works. We see beauty and divinity in them, and if He hath made the external world beautiful He hath made the human soul also, and devised that it shall be beautiful, like a great and beautiful temple, full of costly and beautiful things, a soul in harmony with itself, a soul in harmony with other souls that seek with it to do God's will, a soul filled with purity, light, gladness, charity, a soul overflowing with the love of God, with love of our fellow men, with the earnest desire to do always the things that are pure and virtuous. Look into such a soul and see how beautiful it is, the marvellous symmetry in the human soul, the marvellous colours, divinely gifted, in the human soul, the marvellous possibilities in the human soul. It is God's wonderful picture, His wonderful dream. God made the human soul, and the beauty of God, the beauty of the Divine conception that was in God's mind is expressed there. What a wonder is a beautiful soul! The soul that has been recognized in this world as transcendently beautiful is the soul of Jesus Christ. It has drawn other souls that had been contaminated with sin, drawn them to itself and transformed them to the glorious image; it has influenced more than anything else that we know the whole mind, the whole movement of the human family. The beauty of the soul of Christ — transcendent, heavenly, bewitching — we gaze upon it, and we say, "whatever divinity may be we cannot tell, but this is divine enough, it is the summation of divinest ideals for us." And gazing thus on the beautiful soul of the Christ, we are drawn up and beautified, filled with His love, transformed to His likeness, made more and more divine in the excellence of that grace which He gives to those souls that seek, for His sweet sake, that love to forsake evil, to put away the deformity, the debasement and the ugliness of vice, and to lay a herd of the Divine ideal, the beauty of Christ, and to worship God through Him and in His likeness, laying our noblest and our best, our best thoughts and our best feelings, and our noblest actions on the high altar of dedication to Him who has invited us in the old words of the psalm to worship Him "in the beauty of holiness." (A. Bennie, B.D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.WEB: Ascribe to Yahweh the glory due to his name. Bring an offering, and come into his courts. |
    |