The End Of Our Strength

*Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed*   (John -  20:29)

How strong is the snare of the things that are seen, and how necessary for God to keep us in the things that are unseen! If Peter is to walk on the water he must walk; if he is going to swim, he must swim, but he cannot do both. If the bird is going to fly it must keep away from fences and the trees, and trust to its buoyant wings. But if it tries to keep within easy reach of the ground, it will make poor work of flying.

God had to bring Abraham to the end of his own strength, and to let him see that in his own body he could do nothing. He had to consider his own body as good as dead, and then take God for the whole work; and when he looked away from himself, and trusted God alone, then he became fully persuaded that what He had promised, He was able to perform. That is what God is teaching us, and He has to keep away encouraging results until we learn to trust without them, and then He loves to make His Word real in fact as well as faith.—A. B. Simpson

I do not ask that He must prove  

His Word is true to me,  

And that before I can believe  

He first must let me see.  

It is enough for me to know  

’Tis true because He says ’tis so;  

On His unchanging Word I’ll stand  

And trust till I can understand.  

—E. M. Winter

Nothing Satisfies

 

It is not in me (Job -  28:14)

I remember a summer in which I said, “It is the ocean I need,” and I went to the ocean; but it seemed to say, “It is not in me!” The ocean did not do for me what I thought it would. Then I said, “The mountains will rest me,” and I went to the mountains, and when I awoke in the morning there stood the grand mountain that I had wanted so much to see; but it said, “It is not in me!” It did not satisfy. Ah! I needed the ocean of His love, and the high mountains of His truth within. It was wisdom that the “depths” said they did not contain, and that could not be compared with jewels or gold or precious stones. Christ is wisdom and our deepest need. Our restlessness within can only be met by the revelation of His eternal friendship and love for us.—Margaret Bottome

“My heart is there!  

’Where, on eternal hills, my loved one dwells  

Among the lilies and asphodels;  

Clad in the brightness of the Great White Throne,  

Glad in the smile of Him who sits thereon,  

The glory gilding all His wealth of hair  

And making His immortal face more fair  

THERE IS MY TREASURE and my heart is there.  

“My heart is there!  

’With Him who made all earthly life so sweet,  

So fit to live, and yet to die so meet;  

So mild, so grand, so gentle and so brave,  

So ready to forgive, so strong to save.  

His fair, pure Spirit makes the Heavens more fair,  

And thither rises all my longing prayer  

THERE IS MY TREASURE and my heart is there.”  

—Favorite poem of the late Chas. E. Cowman

You cannot detain the eagle in the forest. You may gather around him a chorus of the choicest birds; you may give him a perch on the goodliest pine; you may charge winged messengers to bring him choicest dainties; but he will spurn them all. Spreading his lofty wings, and with his eye on the Alpine cliff, he will soar away to his own ancestral halls amid the munition of rocks and the wild music of tempest and waterfall.

The soul of man, in its eagle soarings, will rest with nothing short of the Rock of Ages. Its ancestral halls are the halls of Heaven. Its munitions of rocks are the attributes of God. The sweep of its majestic flight is Eternity! “Lord, THOU hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”—Macduff.

“My Home is God Himself”; Christ brought me there.  

I laid me down within His mighty arms;  

He took me up, and safe from all alarms  

He bore me “where no foot but His hath trod,”  

Within the holiest at Home with God,  

And bade me dwell in Him, rejoicing there.  

O Holy Place! O Home divinely fair!  

And we, God’s little ones, abiding there.  

“My Home is God Himself”; it was not so!  

A long, long road I traveled night and day,  

And sought to find within myself some way,  

Aught I could do, or feel to bring me near;  

Self effort failed, and I was filled with fear,  

And then I found Christ was the only way,  

That I must come to Him and in Him stay,  

And God had told me so.  

And now “my Home is God,” and sheltered there,  

God meets the trials of my earthly life,  

God compasses me round from storm and strife,  

God takes the burden of my daily care.  

O Wondrous Place! O Home divinely fair!  

And I, God’s little one, safe hidden there.  

Lord, as I dwell in Thee and Thou in me,  

So make me dead to everything but Thee;  

That as I rest within my Home most fair,  

My soul may evermore and only see  

My God in everything and everywhere;  

My Home is God.  

—Author Unknown

Shut Up To Faith

 Shut up to faith (Gal -  3:23)

God, in olden time suffered man to be kept in ward by the law that he might learn the more excellent way of faith. For by the law he would see God’s holy standard and by the law he would see his own utter helplessness; then he would be glad to learn God’s way of faith.

God still shuts us up to faith. Our natures, our circumstances, trials, disappointments, all serve to shut us up and keep us in ward till we see that the only way out is God’s way of faith. Moses tried by self-effort, by personal influence, even by violence, to bring about the deliverance of his people. God had to shut him up forty years in the wilderness before he was prepared for God’s work.

Paul and Silas were bidden of God to preach the Gospel in Europe. They landed and proceeded to Philippi. They were flogged, they were shut up in prison, their feet were put fast in the stocks. They were shut up to faith. They trusted God. They sang praises to Him in the darkest hour, and God wrought deliverance and salvation.

John was banished to the Isle of Patmos. He was shut up to faith. Had he not been so shut up, he would never have seen such glorious visions of God.

Dear reader, are you in some great trouble? Have you had some great disappointment, have you met some sorrow, some unspeakable loss? Are you in a hard place? Cheer up! You are shut up to faith. Take your trouble the right way. Commit it to God. Praise Him that He maketh “all things work together for good,” and that “God worketh for him that waiteth for him.” There will be blessings, help and revelations of God that will come to you that never could otherwise have come; and many besides yourself will receive great light and blessing because you were shut up to faith.—C. H. P

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet,  

These are not done by jostling in the street.”

No Miracles

 And the rest, some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass that they escaped all safe to land   (Acts - 27:44)

The marvelous story of Paul’s voyage to Rome, with its trials and triumphs, is a fine pattern of the lights and shades of the way of faith all through the story of human life. The remarkable feature of it is the hard and narrow places which we find intermingled with God’s most extraordinary interpositions and providences.

It is the common idea that the pathway of faith is strewn with flowers, and that when God interposes in the life of His people, He does it on a scale so grand that He lifts us quite out of the plane of difficulties. The actual fact, however, is that the real experience is quite contrary. The story of the Bible is one of alternate trial and triumph in the case of everyone of the cloud of witnesses from Abel down to the latest martyr.

Paul, more than anyone else, was an example of how much a child of God can suffer without being crushed or broken in spirit. On account of his testifying in Damascus, he was hunted down by persecutors and obliged to fly for his life. but we behold no heavenly chariot transporting the holy apostle amid thunderbolts of flame from the reach of his foes, but “through a window in a basket,” was he let down over the walls of Damascus and so escaped their hands. In an old clothes basket, like a bundle of laundry, or groceries, the servant of Jesus Christ was dropped from the window and ignominiously fled from the hate of his foes.

Again we find him left for months in the lonely dungeons; we find him telling of his watchings, his fastings, and his desertion by friends, of his brutal and shameful beatings, and here even after God has promised to deliver him, we see him for days left to toss upon a stormy sea, obliged to stand guard over the treacherous seaman, and at last when the deliverance comes, there is no heavenly galley sailing from the skies to take off the noble prisoner; there is no angel form walking along the waters and stilling the raging breakers; there is no supernatural sign of the transcendent miracle that is being wrought; but one is compelled to seize a spar, another a floating plank, another to climb on a fragment of the wreck, another to strike out and swim for his life.

Here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this every day world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.

God’s promises and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our every day experience.—Hard Places in the Way of Faith

Himself

He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me; because he delighted in me (Ps - 18:19)

And what is this “large place”? What can it be but God Himself, that infinite Being in whom all other beings and all other streams of life terminate? God is a large place indeed. And it was through humiliation, through abasement, through nothingness that David was brought into it.—Madame Guyon

“I bare you on eagle’s wings, and brought you unto myself” (Exod. 19:4).

Fearing to launch on “full surrender’s” tide,  

I asked the Lord where would its waters glide  

My little bark, “To troubled seas I dread?”  

“Unto Myself,” He said.  

Weeping beside an open grave I stood,  

In bitterness of soul I cried to God:  

“Where leads this path of sorrow that I tread?”  

“Unto Myself,” He said.  

Striving for souls, I loved the work too well;  

Then disappointments came; I could not tell  

The reason, till He said, “I am thine all;  

Unto Myself I call.”  

Watching my heroes—those I loved the best—  

I saw them fail; they could not stand the test,  

Even by this the Lord, through tears not few,  

Unto Himself me drew.  

Unto Himself! No earthly tongue can tell  

The bliss I find, since in His heart I dwell;  

The things that charmed me once seem all as naught;  

Unto Himself I’m brought. 

Wrestling With GOD

 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day  (Gen -  32:24)

God is wrestling with Jacob more than Jacob is wrestling with God. It was the Son of man, the Angel of the Covenant. It was God in human form pressing down and pressing out the old Jacob life; and ere the morning broke, God had prevailed and Jacob fell with his thigh dislocated. But as he fell, he fell into the arms of God, and there he clung and wrestled, too, until the blessing came; and the new life was born and he arose from the earthly to the heavenly, the human to the divine, the natural to the supernatural. And as he went forth that morning he was a weak and broken man, but God was there instead; and the heavenly voice proclaimed, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”

Beloved, this must ever be a typical scene in every transformed life. There comes a crisis-hour to each of us, if God has called us to the highest and best, when all resources fail; when we face either ruin or something higher than we ever dreamed; when we must have infinite help from God and yet, ere we can have it, we must let something go; we must surrender completely; we must cease from our own wisdom, strength, and righteousness, and become crucified with Christ and alive in Him. God knows how to lead us up to this crisis, and He knows how to lead us through.

Is He leading you thus? Is this the meaning of your deep trial, or your difficult surroundings, or that impossible situation. or that trying place through which you cannot go without Him, and yet you have not enough of Him to give you the victory?

Oh, turn to Jacob’s God! Cast yourself helplessly at His feet. Die to your strength and wisdom in His loving arms and rise, like Jacob, into His strength and all-sufficiency. There is no way out of your hard and narrow place but at the top. You must get deliverance by rising higher and coming into a new experience with God. Oh, may it bring you into all that is meant by the revelation of the Mighty One of Jacob!—But God