God in All Things

I went back to the little town where I was born. I saw the friends of my childhood, and later I went out to God’s acre. There stood the little schoolhouse, and the old academy. The great oak-trees swayed above the house where I was born. The little brook still rippled over the stones; once more the fruit was ripe in the orchard and the nuts brown in the forest trees; again the shouts of the old companions were heard on the hillside and the laughter of the skaters filled the air; and yet all was changed. Gone the old minister, who baptized me! Gone the old professors and teachers who taught us. In the little graveyard slept the fathers. The stars shone over the mounds, the graves were silent, but God was over all. And all is well. For our times have been in God’s hands. –N. D. Hillis.

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Who Art In Heaven?

      “Dwellers on the Mississippi and Missouri, and in the back woods of Canada and the prairies of the West, are there. Millions from the Andes and the isles of the Pacific, from the mountains of Thibet and the cities of China; from every jungle of India and from every pagoda of Hindostan, the untutored Arab and the uncultivated Druse, and the ‘tribes of the weary foot,’ the children of Salem are there,  *  *  and Augustine and Luther are there also, and many, we in our uncharitableness, or bigotry, or exclusiveness, or ignorance, excluded from Heaven, will be there also; and our sires and sons and babes and parents will be there, completed circles never again to be broken, and their united voices will give utterance to their deep and enduring gratitude “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and that hath made us kings and priests unto God, even the Father; to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.” Rev. Dr. Cumming.

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Road To Faith

Take the little “radioscope” in your hand– a tiny tube less than an inch in length, closed at one end, with a small magnifying lens at the other. In the closed end of the tube you observe a small disk of paper covered with microscopic particles of yellow crystals–sulfide of zinc. In front of the yellow crystals is a small metallic pointer, like the second-hand of a very small watch, and on the end of the pointer is–nothing, absolutely nothing, so far as your eye can see. Look at it very carefully. No! Nothing! Now, take the little tube, go into a darkened room, and look into it through the lens end, and you will see a sight incredible. The metal pointer does have a minute speck of something on its tip, and between that tip and the yellow crystals are leaping showers of sparks of light. Will the shower stop after a few minutes? No. After an hour? No; nor after a thousand years! The calculation is that that all but invisible speck on the tip of the pointer will keep that shower of sparks going day and night, for thirty thousand years! For that speck is radium, which actually seems as tho it were a hot fragment struck off from God’s great white throne, so amazing is its radiant energy.

It operates, not merely by setting “waves” in motion, but it throws off a stream of actual particles which move with an inconceivable velocity (at the rate, some physicists allege of 200,000 miles a second), and without–and here is the miracle–without any apparent diminution in the morsel of radium itself. It can hurl these particles literally through six inches of armor plate. It can and does send them right through your own head while you are looking at them, just as if your brain were a loose sieve, as perhaps it is, or a grove of trees quite wide apart, and a bright, flashing bird, all crimson and gold, were flying right through the trees, without even hitting his wings.

Now, what I want to say is that the modern discovery of such marvels as these, as being real, actual, objective, demonstrated facts, stretches the mind out into a thrilling series of undreamed-of possibilities, and this is a preparation for faith. This is the first step. This is the first lamp on the modern road to faith.–Albert J. Lyman.

Faith is like…

• walking on a tightrope
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Faith Fulfilled By Works

A youthful owner of swine had a wealthy uncle. His uncle cribbed corn for the market. One day he told his nephew that he could have all the corn that he could carry in a blanket from the cribs, where the men were shelling, across the alley to the barn where the swine were kept. To his uncle’s surprise and delight, the boy took him at his word, and carried corn all day. The boy did this because he had faith in his uncle’s word. The nephew’s faith pleased him when he sow how much corn he had. It the boy had professed belief in his uncle’s promise without acting upon it, there would have been intellectual assent but no real faith.

This is a type of our relation to God. Faith takes God at his word. “His divine power hath given us all things that pertain to life and Godliness through the knowledge of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue, whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises.” Every gift of God that we accept and use for Him is a new proof of our faith.

More Links To Faithfulness:

• Great Is Thy Faithfulness
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• The God You Can Trust

God Surrounding The Soul

      Constant communion will surround us with an atmosphere through which none of the many influences which threaten our Christian life and our Christian work can penetrate. As the diver in his bell sits dry at the bottom of the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens far above him, and is parted from that murderous waste of green death that clings so closely round the translucent crystal walls which keep him sage, so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves all that would overflow to destroy us and our work, and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters some courses in the great building that shall one day rise, stately and many-mansioned, from out of the conquered waves. –Alexander McLaren.

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Symbolic Preaching

   A good example of symbolic preaching is afforded in the following descriptions of a sermon by a Chinese evangelist named Li, of Changsha, China on the value of the soul:

Mr. Li began by describing a clock, without naming it, calling it dead and yet alive. He showed that it has all the parts of a living mechanism, but that this mechanism is dead; without two great essentials. The clock was then shown to the audience and they were led to see that a spring is the source of power, but that power must be applied to the spring before the mechanism does it work. The preacher skillfully illustrated by these facts the importance of the soul, and the relation which it bears on the one hand to man and on the other to God. About twenty minutes were devoted to this illustration, after which the preacher quoted a number of texts from the Scriptures bearing upon the teaching of the value of the soul. G. E. Dawson, Missionary Review of the World.

Testimony To The Bible

In the district of Allahabad some conversions had taken place among the women and girls which had greatly stirred up the opposition of the men. The reading circles in the Zenanas had to be stopped and the missionaries were prohibited from visiting the women. One old woman, explaining the situation, said: “Our men say you come and take us away. It is not you who take our women away and make them Christians; it is your Book. There are such wonderful words in it; when they sink into the heart nothing can take them out again.”

More Links To Thoughts On The Bible:

• Wonderful Words of Life
• …A dialogue between Bible-lovers, Bible-haters, and everyone in-between…
• The Bible from CARM
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• The Wonderful Book – The Bible
• God’s Wonderful Book Divine!
• God’s Book, the Bible
• The Most Amazing Book!
• The Bible: Beyond Sunday School

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Effacement of Sins

   We are reminded of the promise that God will “blot out” our transgressions by the following incident:

  John Maynard was in an old-time country schoolhouse. Most of the year he had drifted carelessly along, but in midwinter some kind words from his teacher roused him to take a new start, and he became distinctly a different boy, and made up for the earlier faults. At the closing of  examination he passed well, to the great joy of his father and mother, who were present. But the copy-books used through the year were all laid on the table for the visitors to look at; and John remembered that his copy-book, fair enough in its latter pages, had been a dreary mass of blots and bad work before. He watched his mother looking over those books, and his heart was sick. But she seemed, to his surprise, quite pleased with what she saw, and called his father to look with her; and afterward John found that his kind teacher had thoughtfully torn out all those bad, blotted leaves, and made his copy-book begin where he started to do better. (Text)- Franklin Noble, “Sermons in Illustration.”

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Incredulity

Dr. W. H. Thomson, in his book on “What is Physical Life,” says that, “once, while talking to a roomful of the naturally bright people of a town in Mount Hermon about the achievements of Western civilization, I happened to tell a toothless old man present that in our country we had skilled persons who could make for him an entirely new set of teeth. Glancing round the room, I noticed some listeners stroking their beards in a fashion which I knew meant that I was telling a preposterous yarn. Fortunately I had with me an elderly Scotch friend who had a set of false teeth, and on explaining the situation to him, he forthwith opened his mouth and pulled the whole set out. The Arabs jumped to their feet in fright, not sure but he might start to unscrew his head next, for had any of their venerated ancestors ever seen such an uncanny performance with teeth? They afterward said that never would they have believed this if they had not seen it.”

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Harmony Is God’s Work

In “Famous Stories by Sam P. Jones” may be found this bit of wisdom:

A well-trained musician sits down to a piano and sweeps his fingers over the keys. A cloud gathers on his face as he recognizes a discord in the instrument. What is the matter? Three of the keys are out of harmony. These three keys that are out of harmony with everything in the universe that is in harmony. I say to that musician, “Close up that piano and let it alone until it puts itself in harmony.” He replies, “It is impossible for the piano to put itself in harmony.” “Who can put it in harmony?” I ask. He replies, “The man who made the instrument.” The instrument is put into the hands of the man who made it, and in a few hours every key on the piano is in harmony, and the piano being in harmony with itself is in harmony with everything else in the universe.”

God alone can put discordant souls into harmony!