It was another dreary day -- it felt more like November than May. It had been raining steadily for hours, a cold, cheerless rain. The heavy sky was miserable with dark clouds. After a while, my husband looked out the window and said, "There are patches of blue." That phrase caught my fancy, danced delightedly in my thoughts and spun pleasant pictures in my mind. As I thought about it, another phrase joined it in my thinking, "Nuggets of gold and patches of blue."
Nuggets of gold are those special insights into the Word of God when the Holy Spirit makes a particular aspect of some truth radiant in your heart. Nuggets of gold are the currency with which you can always purchase patches of blue, no matter how cloudy your day or how difficult your circumstances. Patches of blue are the shining reminder that above the changing clouds there is a Constant Sovereign Sun of Righteousness. Of course the best nuggets of gold are the ones you discover for yourself. But for now, let me share one of my nuggets with you.
Take it, spend it liberally, and buy yourself some patches of blue.
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I had started to pray for Israel but then I began to talk to the Lord about His physical heritage. When Almighty God became flesh, He inherited a human ancestry. Of course I know that He is in the line of David and from the Tribe of Judah; but I began to think of all the implications for the God-Man to have human forefathers. The sinless One had aunts and uncles, grandparents, etc., all part of a fallen race. While still sitting there and contemplating the long-ago, Jesus spoke to me and said that this was all part of the ever-current GREAT EXCHANGE.
Then my mind began to grapple with the far-reaching wonder, as my heart bowed low in worship. Sin entered into the human race by one man and sin became our heredity. By the Holy Spirit, another MAN entered the human race to deliver us from the heredity of sin. When He clothed Himself with a human body, Jesus inherited all our past, for all generations, since the dawn of creation. Because of all He accomplished on the Cross, God now so identifies us with the Lord Jesus, that ...... we have no past but Christ's past!
Through Jesus Christ we have received an unsullied heredity. I see more clearly now that the concept of "not I but Christ," is not a narrow one. It is all that I am and the effect of all that ever happened and by all who ever lived to bring me to all that I am --
EXCHANGED
--- for all that Christ is, which He always was and always will be. For me to live is Christ: He is my past, He is my present and He is my future.
This is the only explanation for how He can keep me from falling, present me faultless before the Presence of His glory ..... and have great joy in doing it; because it is His eternal triumph in the Great Exchange which has voided all of Satan's transactions,
With love and prayers,