Readings for such a time as this(1): - from: Wingspread _____________ Out of the paw of the lion His determination to enter the ministry never left the boy, and we see him at fourteen, physically weak, but possessing a mind far beyond his years, studying Latin, Greek and higher mathematics under a private teacher, as a step in the direction of his goal. But the stripling was attempting the impossible. Remember that up to this time he had had no satisfying experience of grace, and he was trying to do as a son of Adam what can only be done by a son of God. He was preparing for a ministry in the Spirit, and his troubled heart told him that he was yet in the flesh. And temperamentally he was at cross purposes with himself by his very nature and upbringing. No matter how hard his intellect tries it cannot keep up with his racing soul, his soaring imagination. Already the poet and the theologian are at war within him; John Keats and John Calvin are having it out to the finish, and young Albert is both of them, taking a brutal slugging no matter which one wins. His teachers have tried hard to make him into a good, solid, logical young man, staid and conventional, with his two feet firm on the hard ground; but nature will not work along with them. She will be forever singing to him, forever tempting him away from the sullen earth and bidding him stretch his wings to the blue heaven. When just short of fifteen he leaves his private teacher and enrolls in Chatham High School, which is located nine miles from the Simpson home. Of course, this necessitates a daily trip of eighteen miles through all kinds of weather—and they have all kinds in that part of Canada. He rode a horse as often as one could be spared from necessary work on the farm, but it seems that he still had to commute on foot more frequently than a boy of fifteen should have done, especially one of his delicate constitution. Now that other mysterious change begins to take place. The trusting boy is passing away and the seeing man is emerging, first the one and then the other taking the ascendency. Physical maladjustments add themselves to the temperamental conflict already raging within him. Hard study has weakened his nerves and predisposed him toward despair. Suddenly the accumulated terrors of a multitude of books and sermons on total depravity and the damnation of the non-elect roar out upon him like a lion from the thicket and throw him into mortal panic for his dying soul. He cries out in anguish, but there is no one to help him. The proud man within him will not permit him to go to his mother with his fears, and the timid boy dare not go to his father. How can a boy talk to a somber Presbyterian elder about anything as painfully intimate as that, especially when that elder is your father, and you remember how solemn and awful your father used to look at you when you missed one question in the catechism or smiled on the holy Sabbath? And you remember how he used to sentence you to a whipping in the evening, and then wait till morning to carry out the sentence; and you can still feel the cold chill that would come over you when you woke for the hundredth time in the night, and at last saw gray light which you shuddered to think was the herald of the dawn, and the trouncing. Well, the human organism can take only so much, and the distressed boy had had enough. Suddenly came that fearful crash, of which he later wrote so movingly, when the very heavens seemed to be coming undone before his terrified eyes; a blazing light shines above him, and his familiar earth crumbles away from beneath his feet, plunging him down into the center of spinning worlds and crashing ruin. He comes out of this physical spin only to go into a worse mental spin a second later. He leaps up in mortal agony and stands impaled upon the point of a fixed idea like a fly upon the point of a pin; he is to die in a few minutes, when that clock there on the table is on the hour, and it is four minutes of the hour now! Any help will do at this moment. His pride and fear give way before a greater terror, and he cries aloud for his father to come and pray for him. The father does not fail him. Beneath an exterior of cultivated austerity is a great Scotch heart, full of tenderest affection. His boy is dearer to him than the ruddy drops that visit his sad heart. It may be a bit irregular, and he cannot just remember where such a thing is found in the Scriptures, but father love overcomes doctrinal objections, so down he goes to his knees to pour out his heart for his darling lad with all the strength there is in him. God has mercy on them both, and the boy is able to relax a little, though for days he cannot sleep unless someone is near to assure him, and he will go into nervous spasms as the fatal hour approaches—the torture hour fixed like a sharp stake in his exhausted mind—and will hardly believe he is alive when the hour has passed. And still no one could tell him the simple gospel story. Strange no one remembered the story of the prodigal boy and the kind, trembling old father who received him back again from the far country with the touching, tender words: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. Such is the power of loveless doctrine to freeze the heart and dull the mind. So the stripling had to struggle back to health again as best he could without the consolations of divine forgiveness. Well, as God would have it, when he had recovered enough to be about again, though still in terrible distress for his soul, he was one day browsing among the books in his old ministers library when, all unexpectedly, the big moment came for which he had waited so long. He flipped a page in an old musty volume, called Marshalls Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, and suddenly his eyes were fixed on a passage that stood out like fire from the rest: The first good work you will ever perform is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Until you do this, all your works, prayers, tears, and good resolutions are vain. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe that He saves you according to His Word, that He receives and saves you here and now, for He has said: Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. That was enough. A heart as hungry as his and a mind as keen, needed no more. With rapture he slid to his knees and closed with the promise, and there came to his soul such a sweet, restful knowledge of sins forgiven as swept away his fears like a flood. God had delivered him out of the paw of the lion. - via WORDsearch10 #readingsforsuchatimeasthis #christjesus #vineofchristministries #theword #studyscripture #god #biblestudy #bible #jesus #faith #holyspirit
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 23:47:11 +0000
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