Devotional Column

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 184, 6 August 1938, Page 7

Devotional Column

PRAYER. Our Father, we thank Thee that at Thy right hand i 3 the Prince of Life. Our souls adore our Blessed Lord for His conquest on Calvary. We rejoice that, as Conqueror He rose to manifest and maintain the power of His risen lifo in us. Lord, we are risen with Thee, one with Thee in the likeness of Thy resurrection,' come and take us entirely for Thine own. In Thee we trust to Thee, we make full surrender. We pray Thee live Thou Thy life in us, that we may be a continual source of light and blessing to all around. Amen. Scripture: Psalm 24; John 20. THE FIRST FALSE STEF. * * Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree in the garden?” The source of most rivers is very small and insignificant. If you were to be placed suddenly at the source ot the Nile, near Lake Tanganyika in Africa, you would scarcely believe it to bo the fountainhead of the world’s longest river- And if you penetrated to the source of the Amazon, the greatest river in the world, you would fini it in a tiny rivulet in tl » Andes Mountains of Peru. These are small beginnings, but they become mighty cataracts of fury and power before they empty into the sea. Like these, the River of Lost Souls had a very insignificant source. It was in the rebellion of a lone woman. She partook j of a forbidden fruit, which, so lar as the fruit was concerned, was unimportant. What was of signficance and importance was the attitude behind the act, for it represented the rebellion of a free moral agent against the sovereign God. Bve sinned before she ate of the fruit. She sinned when she doubted God’s word—when she rebelled in her heart against God’s restrictions. ‘‘IF GOD BE FOR US, WHO OAN BE AGAINST US? Say, not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. Il hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern window* only, When daylight comes, cofes in the light; In front the sun climbs slew, how slowly I But westward, look the land is bright!

—Arthur Hugh Clough.

“PRESS TOWARD THE MARK.”

“Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are bet ore, I press toward the mark.”—Phil. 3:13.

Surely for once that the Holy Spirit, whether by Scriptural precept or by apostolic example, bids us to forget, He bids us twenty times to rememuer. Our duty to remember is less likely to be overlooked than our duty to forget. Perhaps, therefore, it is all the more incumbent upon us to pay special heed to the rare and occasional admonition tc forget.

The admonition, implied in Paul’s words, to forget the things of the past is a wide and embracing one. Doubtless, when he wrote this chapter of his letter to the Philippians, he referred in “those things which are behind” primarily to what he had been, and done in the old Jewish days—the greatest in Judaism to which be had been born, the greatness which he had achieved, perhaps also the greatness that had been thrust upon him. Ho counted them but loss, and consigued them to a contemptuous oblivion. But he plainly consigned them to oblivion not entirely or even mainly because he despised them, but because they were a hindrance to his progress in the Christian race.

Oblivion of past glory and distinction is essential to Christian progress, inueed, it was only by definitely repudiating legal righteousness, by disowning all “standing in the flesh,” by confessing that nono of those things in which he had formerly boasted gave him any shred of a tit!6 to God’s favour—it was only so that Paul was qualified to run in the Christian race at all.

But even after one has become qualified by God’s converting grace to run in the Christian race, there is a constant, though often unrealised, temptation to look back upon past achievement. The Christian runner may have run well in the past; knowing his God, he may have “done exploits.” Let him forget these things, or remember them only to confess how much sin was mingled with the best things he ever did —but even so, let him not remember them overmuch, because his duty and his sacred ambition are to “press toward the mark.”