December 13

A Perfect Way

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
—1 Corinthians 13:1

Scripture reading: 1 Corinthians 13

Did you ever read a verse like this? It is the state of being brought into a treasury. Do you know what a treasury is? A treasury holds or handles priceless things.

God puts you into the treasury to hold or handle the precious gifts of the Spirit. Therefore, so that you may not fail to handle them correctly, He gives you a picture of how you may handle them.

What a high position of authority, of grace, the Lord speaks about in this verse! “Speak with the tongues of men and of angels.” Oh, isn’t that wonderful! There are men who have such wonderful qualifications for speaking. Their knowledge in the natural realm is so outstanding that many people go to hear their eloquent addresses because the language in them is so beautiful. Yet, through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, God puts you right in the midst of them and says that He has given you the capability to speak like men, with power of thought and language at your disposal, so that you can say anything.

People are failing God all the time all over the world because they are taken up with their own eloquence, and God is not in it. They are lost with the pretentiousness of their great authority over language, and they use it on purpose to tickle the ears and the sensations of the people, and it profits nothing. It is nothing. It will wither up, and the people who use it will wither up.

Yet God has said there is a way. Now, how would language “of men and of angels” come to prosper?

When you wept through to victory before, you were able to do anything. You were so undone that unless God helped you to do it, you couldn’t do it. You were so broken in spirit that your whole body seemed to be at an end unless God reinstated you. Then the unction came, and every word was glorifying Jesus. Every sentence lifted the people, and they felt as they listened, “Surely God is in this place! He has sent His Word and healed us.” (See Psalm 107:20.) They saw no man there except Jesus. Jesus was so manifested that they all said, “Oh, wasn’t Jesus speaking to our hearts this morning!”

If you minister in this way, you will never become nothing. Tongues of men and angels alone will come to nothing. Yet if you speak with tongues of men and angels that are bathed in the love of God until it is to Him alone that you speak, then it will be written down forever in the history of the glory. So let the Lord help us to know how to act in the Holy Spirit.

Thought for today: When you are used only for and desire only the glory of God, your acts and life, ministry, and power will be an recorded endlessly in the glory of heaven — for the Acts of the Apostles are being recorded in the glory.

Smith Wigglesworth Devotional: 365 Day Devotional
By Whitaker House

Smith Wigglesworth was a man who took God at his word, and God used his faith as a model for others. Explore these daily truths from Scripture and the writings of the Apostle of Faith, and you’ll quench your spiritual thirst, conquer defeating fears, be an effective soul winner, and see impossibilities turn into realities. 558 pages.

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Smith Wigglesworth Devotional