%
September 1943
Teachers
Sparrows That Became
By HARRY RIMMER
I T SEEMS a strange thing for a Christian to say, but there are times when it is actually un comfortable to know some parts of the Bible. You wouldn’t think that one Golden Text learned in Sunday- school would keep a small boy from getting rich, but that is practically what happened to me. When I was very young, I lived in a small town in California. There were so many English sparrows that it looked as though they were going to carry the town away. They became such a nuisance that the city offi cials passed a law saying they would pay anybody five cents for each spar row killed. I was sure there were a million dollars’ worth of sparrows right around my house. I decided that on Monday morning I would start out and collect. I picked up my trusty air rifle, loaded my pocket with B-B shot, and started out to reap a fortune. Within ten feet of the front door I saw a dozen sparrows sitting on a limb of a tree. I aimed my rifle, and when the rifle went “pirig,” a dead sparrow hit the pavement. I said to myself, “There is the first nickel. I will be rich before night.” But just then, into my mind there flashed the Golden Text that 1 had learned in Sunday-school the day be fore. This text was from Matthew 10: 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for
that if you would buy two pennies' worth, the merchant would throw in one for nothing. Then Jesus said,. “Ye are of more value than many sparrows.” If God is so careful about common things like birds, how much more interested He must be in boys and girls! But suppose we ask: Where did birds come from? Oh, you say, they hatched out of eggs! That is true, but where did thè eggs come from? Yoq say that is easy—birds laid them. Now we come back to the old, old question: Which came first, the bird or the egg? The bird would have to còme first before an egg could be laid; if a bird was made without an egg to hatch from, that was creation, and only God could have' done it. Birds are a proof of creation. They are .born knowing things that you never can learn. When a sparrow is thirty days’ old, it is able tó care for itself. Could you do that at four weeks of age? When you were thirty days old, you were getting your beefsteak out of a bottle and you hardly knew enough to swallow it. By the time a sparrow is six months old, it knows enough to build a house and get ready to raise a family. Everything you can do, somebody had to teach you. But nobody teaches birds how to build a nest or what kind of a nest to build. Somebody had to tell you what things in this world were good to eat, and,
a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (that is, without the notice of your Father which is in heaven). That thought ruined my prospects of getting rich. Every time I aimed my air gun at a sparrow, I thought I could see the eye of God in front of my sights watching the sparrow i was trying to shoot. I just could not make myself pull the.trigger. Other boys with their guns made three dollars, four dollars, and five dollars, which was a fortune to a boy of ten years of age. But as the days went by, 1 stayed poor, because I couldn’t shoot a sparrow if the eye of God was on it. By the way, did you ever think of sparrows? They preach the gospel of the grace and love of God. On one other occasion Jesus said, “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten be fore God?” (Lk. 12:6). Some people have thought there was a great contradiction between these two texts. In one place it is said that sparrows are sold two for a penny, and in the next place it says they are five for two pennies. Indeed, one man told me he could not believe the Bible because this “mistake” was there. I asked him whether he ever saw apples offered at five cents apiece, or six for twenty-five cents. Is that a mistake? Of course not! Sparrows were so cheap,
Junior King's Business By MARTHA S. HOOKER Member of Faculty . Bible Institute o f Los Angeles
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker