DEVOTIONAL COLUMN

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 253, 20 September 1930, Page 12

DEVOTIONAL COLUMN

PRAYER. I. Dear Lord, Thou knowest I have prayed my prayer, And Thou hast heard, and I have left it there, Assured that Thou wilt answer in Thy way; It may be soon or in a later day. 11. So I am comforted, and fully know Thou knowest what is best for me below; And in Thy good time I, too, shall see That Thou hast ordered what is best for me. 111. And day by day upward I look to Thee, Quite sure that Thou each day dost care for me; And I may claim co-partnership above In God, the Father’s, and Thine own, great Jove. “MY JEWELS.” (Mai iii. 17). “They that feared the Lord, that thought upon His name; they shall be Mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up My jewels.”— Mai. iii 16, 17. “Fear not I I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine.” —Isa. xliii 1. “When He cometh, when He cometh, To make up His jewels, All His jewels, precious jewels, His loved and His own.”

Behind all true Christian service—service, that is, springing from a sense of Divine vocation and sustained by a supernatural motive —‘lies the interior life of prayer. And if that prayerlife, and therefore the service that springs from it, is feeble and ineffective, it is largely because it lacks the background of genuine, honest thinking. “To think well,” says Thomas Traherne, “is to serve God in the interior court.” . To pray well presupposes patient and systematic meditation; for meditation is nothing else than the art of thinking well and thoroughly upon the truths upon which prayer is based.

RE-DEDICATION i I. My Lord, I have not always been All that Thou hast required; But Thou, Who knowest hearts has seen That I to Thee aspired. 11. I have aspired to know Thy will,' . And Thy will to obey; My spirit with Thine Own now fill, And lead me in Thy way. 111. Come now, 0 Lord, be Thou to me My Life and Righteousness; That I might testify to Thee By constant faithfulness.

FALSE OPTIMISM. The concealed trap-door through which every child of God falls who ignores or denies the Second Coming is this: That the very prophecies which assert God’s complete ultimate triumph, after a decisive Armageddon, he—without the Armageddon—pours over the situation as a soporific and an anodyne; so that desperate evil which ought to be fought to the death is quietly assumed to be an evanescent by-product of evolution; and God Himself is brought in (by an error which can be perfectly honest, and sincere) to establish and authenticate a monstrous misinterpretation of the modern crisis. No man is logically justified in accepting God’s heaven while rejecting God’s hell, or in forecasting a golden age while obliterating (jjie agony (birth-pangs: Matt. xxiv. 8) which alone, can give it birth. For two days after the outbreak of the Great War, Dr. Clifford says, he was too stunned to pray. Happy will be the younger generation if, cradled in a false optimism, and identifying the Most High with a “social” Christianity, it does not turn infidel at the first shock of the last judgments. WHERE IS HAPPINESS? Not in Unbelief.—Voltaire was an infidel of the most pronounced type. He wrote: “I wish 1 had never been born.” Not in Pleasure.—Lord Byron lived a life of pleasure, if anyone did. He wrote: “The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone.” Not in Money.—Jay Gould, the American millionaire, had plenty of that. When dying, he said: “I suppose I am the most miserable devil on earth.” Not in Position and Fame.—Lord Beaconsfield enjoyed . more than his share of both. He wrote: “Youth is a mistake, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.” Not in Military Glory ,-r- Alexander the Great conquered the known world in his day. .Having done so, he wept in his 'tent because he said: “There are no more worlds to conquer.” One and' all they confirm Solomon’s verdict: “All is vanity and vexation of spirit.”—(Eccles. 2, 17).. Where, then, is happiness to be found?” Jesus said: “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” (John 15, 22.) The answer is simple: In Christ Alone. Taste for your self, and you will say: “None other Name for me, Taste for yourself, and you will say: joy, Lord Jesus, found in Thee.”