Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 3.pdf/147

 desire always draws down the Divine presence of the Word made flesh. Now, the Lord Jesus Christ is the very Eternal Truth, and He only can guide us into all truth. He mercifully instructs us according to our states; and when we receive truth in the memory, and live according as we understand it, He gradually unfolds our powers of perception, until we are prepared for higher manifestations of His wisdom; He changes the water of our natural truth into the wine of spiritual truth, and performs anew in us the miracle which He first wrought at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. But He left Galilee, in order to instruct us, that we must not be satisfied to remain in the mere knowledge of natural truth. He proceeds from Galilee to Jordan to shew us the necessity of progressing or going forward in the performance of our duty, in order to prepare ourselves for admission into His true and spiritual church. The Lord walks before us. His mild, encouraging voice calls unto us, "Follow me, and ye shall find rest to your souls." Self often pleads for its own natural gratification. It clings to its father and mother; to its former delights and gratifications; to its former dark and ignorant thoughts; and in the blindness of its own will exclaims, "Lord, I will follow Thee, but suffer me first to go and bury my father." The command of the Lord, however, is, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead." "Let us, then, go forward. Follow the Lord. Ye must be born again." When the Lord was baptized, it is said "He went up straightway out of the water;" thus instructing us that there is no one state in which we must rest.

Water represents natural truth, introductory to Spiritual truth. Jordan was the natural boundary of