DEVOTIONAL COLUMN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 52, 28 January 1933, Page 11

DEVOTIONAL COLUMN

PRAYER. Our gracious God, we draw nigh and offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for Thine abounding grace and infinite mercy. Grant, we beseech Thee, power to walk in the light, and in fellowship with Thyself. May Thy presence lighten our darkness and take the sting from our sorrow. Enable us like the Apostle Paul, to take pleasure in suffering for Christ’s sake. Accept our praises and our petitions, through Christ our Lord. Amen. Scripture : Psa. 100; Phil 4. ELOQUENCE OF SERVICE. Service is more eloquent than speech. Many of the most efficient workers for God in the world have protested that they had not the ability of eloquence, but God has been able to use them in large and glorified service. This thought was expressed recently by Clarence E. Flynn in the following lines : “I am not eloquent,” he said. “I cannot - spin of thought’s fine gold A sentence lovely to be read, A story wondrous to be told.” Thus did he answer God one day Upon a new Tiberian shore. And God said, “No, but you can say The word of love. I ask no more.” And so across the hurried years, Across the mighty land and sea, Through calm and tempest, joy and tears, He bore the message faithfully. He bore it till the set of sun, Until his time and strength were spent. To-day the service he has done, Beyond all speech, is eloquent.

“REST AWHILE:” The following lines express perfectly the object of an ideal Sunday: From the coming and the going From the human flood-tide flowing In the markets, in the highways, In the avenues and byways Ere the world your soul defile Come apart and rest awhile.

From the scenes that are deceiving,! From the foolishnuess and grieving, From all envying and hating, Friends and neighbours alienating Ere you walk another mile Come apart and rest awhile. Tire words of Ahraliam Lincoln are impressive: “As we keep or break the | ■ Lord’s Day, we nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope by which man rises.” RENEWAL. The rest we need is not the rest of ease, but of renewal. While we sleep the exhausted cells are recharged and the night removes from us the fears of a tired life. The impossible has often become possible to us after a night of sleep; the problem that baffled our minds has solved itself. And “they that wait upon the Lord renew their strength,” new channels are formed for thought; fresh winds sweep upon the spirit; highways for the feet open out before us. But we give ourselves so little time for the gentle, silent, restful relationships of life. Says Pascal: “All the ills of life spring from a simple source —we are not able to sit still in a room.” Be still: the room will become a sanctuary; the silence will become a Voice; the stillness a Presence. IF. If God had not believed in Foreign , Missions, Would He have called Abram to go to the far country? 4 Would Jonah have been sent to , Nineveh ? Would the Father have given His Only Begotten Son to be the WorldMissionary ? If Jesus had not believed in Foreign Missions, Would He have gone through Samaria? Would He have said, “Other sheep I have. . . them also I must bring”? Would He have commissioned His followers to make disciples of All Nations, or to “go into the world”? Would He have gone to Calvary for all men ?

If the Apostles had not believed in Foreign Missions, Would they have gone to the Gentiles and suffered martyrdom for their faith ?

! If Paul had not believed in Foreign Missions, Would he have gone to Macedonia and Rome ? if the Holy Spirit did not believe in Foreign Missions, Would He call men and women of ■every race and every vocation to go to the ends of the earth? THE TROUBLE WITH “TRY.” “Try” is a word that has little place in the vocabulary of God. What place does it have in the vocabulary of our Christian life ? It is related of Hudson Taylor that he heard Christians use the word “try” so frequently, and linking it usually with the expectation of failure, that _ he decided to find out how many things God told his people to try to do. He went from Genesis to Revelation, and, while he noted hundreds of humanly impossible things God commanded His people to do, he could find not one that God told them to try to do. In a Bible and Christian life conference in California one of the speakers repeated a little exhortation that “Daddy” Hall used to give to his “down-and-out” congregation in the famous Galilee Mission in Philadelphia. “The trouble with you fellows is you are trying to give up your drinking and smoking and cussing. Now t-r-v uses up only three fingers and leaves two fingers for the Devil to get hold of. Use up all the fingers this way: t-r-u-s-t.” An evangelist returning from a very successful campaign of soul winning, but hungry for victory in his own life, heard this illustration. He went to a friend and said: “That is what I need. And I’ve tried to do that. But somehow the Devil must be using the fingers of my other ,hand. What am I going to do with them?” “Do this,” his friend answered, spelling on his fingers : “y-i-e-l-d, and then, t-r-u-s-t.” “So,” said the evangelist,- in the SaySo meeting at the conference, “Fve yielded and I’m trusting, and Christ has made everything different. The unyielded life may try to be good. But the trying one fails. The yielded life trusts. The trusting one does not fail, because the trusted One cannot fail.”