Watchwords and Warnings
"The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.... Moreover by them is thy servant warned." (Psalm 19: 9, 11)
Saviour ! may we never cherish That which nailed Thee to the cross,
All of earth, oh, let it perish, Be it counted worse than loss.
Let no siren's song seducing, Turn us from our joys divine,
Idols in the heart producing, Hearts which would be wholly Thine.
(pp. 181-184, Footprints for Pilgrims)
"Do all things without murmurings and disputings." We murmur at a thousand things in our lot, just as the Israelites did in the wilderness, and thereby question the care, the love, and the wisdom of Him who orders all our path, and lose the blessed sense of His presence with us.
When people become slaves to a fad they soon become tyrants.
When knowledge enters the head it exalts me. When knowledge enters the heart it humbles me.
Nothing has so corrupted Christianity as the acceptance of worldly help for the furtherance of its objects.
May we never bridge over the chasm between the worlds and us, and we shall never seek to do so if we can adopt the language of the apostle, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."
All error has a particle of truth in it, and that is why it is so dangerous.
"Wisdom and might are his." (Daniel 2:20) A simple utterance, but how profound ! For if wisdom and might are God's, they are nowhere else to be found, and it is in vain to turn for them to any but God.
Philanthropy has man for its object, religion has God for its object.
Wherever there is a claim to great spirituality there is a danger.
A meeting ought to close when it is over. The Lord often leaves a meeting long before the people do.
If you make health an object, you never get it.
Nothing so injures the soul as controversy.
In this day of grace God would have all men to be saved, and hence we have to beseech (2 Cor. 5:20) -- not denounce -- all men. You cannot feed souls with denunciations -- even though the things denounced are errors.
Even a German poet said, "Refute error by the statement of the truth," so the presentation of Christ will expose evil and build up the hearers.
How easily we stray whenever we get on the line of expediency. The Lord must have the first place, or we shall soon drift on the rocks.
Two lessons we need to learn -- first to be brought to an end of ourselves and also to be brought to the end of man, and we then expect nothing from self, and nothing from man.
If our hearts are set on one single thing on which the heart of God is not set, in so far we are out of communion.
There are only two channels of testimony -- the lip and the life, and the lip should be but the expression of what has been first produced in the life. What we should all desire is intense reality, to be possessed and controlled by the truth we profess to hold, and thus to shun the use of phrases and sentences which we have never eaten, digested and found true in our souls.
--- E.D.
