The Holiest of All By Andrew Murray

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It was a sacrifice of all his own thoughts and wishes, when he
was kept waiting for Isaac twenty-five years. But all this was
only to prepare him for the crowning sacrifice the giving up
of his only son, the son of the promise, to the death.
And what was it that gave faith its strength and its victory
here in this his severest trial? It was faith in God as the
almighty One, able to raise up even from the dead.
In the
birth of Isaac he had learnt to know God as the giver of life,
even where he was as good as dead. He knew and trusted his
God, as God who quickeneth the dead and calleth the things that
are not as though they were. And what is it that will give our
faith the same all-victorious strength, and prepare us for the
same mighty exhibition of God s quickening power on our
behalf? If we are to have the same faith, and the same
experience of God, we must be prepared to make the same
sacrifice. Our lesson of to-day leads us to the very deepest
roots of the life of faith. The deeper we are willing to enter
into the death to self, the more shall we know of the mighty
power of God, and the perfect blessedness of a perfect trust.
In the faith of Sarah we saw what the meaning and the
power was of faith in the living and life-giving God. But
Abraham on Moriah carries us much further. Sarah trusted
God to supply a power that was wanting in nature Abraham
;
to restore a life that had been taken away. Sarah is the type of
a soul that waits on God for His quickening power, as an act of
grace and faithfulness, ere it thinks much of the death of self.
With her the quickening came to meet a deadness that appears
simply the result of the weakness of nature. With Abraham
all is different Isaac, the God-given life, must be sacrificed,
ere this new display of power can be expected. That sacrifice
was to teach that even the God-given life is still subject to the