out God and without hope in the world” . One would think that we would let no day pass without telling them of the hidden Fountain where we drink our sweetest draughts; of the Vine from which we daily pluck our most luscious fruit; of the great Rock which is our cooling shade when the sun of adver sity scorches hardest; of the Friend who having loved us once “will love us unto the end.” Yet, strange to say, when it comes to this we are mute with these God-given men. With everything else, we are glib; with this, wholly dumb. Then some day comes the heart attack, the paralysis, the brain hemorrhage—and all is over and our God-given man goes out into an endless and hopeless eter nity without one single word of loving warning from us to whom God gave him. Surely our silence has been a deadly silence before which we need to bow our heads in tears of shame, penitence, and humiliation. A ship is nearing a dangerous shore in a dark, stormy night. No friendly lighthouse sends forth its beams to warn of impending wreck and death. But suddenly a voice is heard out of the darkness calling upon the helmsman to bear away from the fatal coast. Unheeded at first, it falls again and again with warning cry, upon the now-aroused crew. Quickly the ship is put about and bears out into the safety of the open sea, with the voice that has saved them from an awful death still ring ing in their ears. The passengers never see the face of the man who saved them. They never are priv ileged to pour out the gratitude that floods their hearts. They never even know the name of their unseen rescuer. They have been saved by a voice! You are a Sunday school teacher. For years you have been sowing the seed of the Word in the hearts of your scholars, quickening it with prayer, water ing it with tears. You think that the boys and girls will soon go out into the world, and you and all your words be forgotten. So they do go out to begin life in earnest. The storms of temptation arise; the billows of passion surge over the soul; dark ness, sin and eternal death are at hand. There is no tried friend at hand to warn; no older head to counsel; no experienced hand to unmask hideous sin. The boy is about to be shipwrecked! But sud denly, at the awful crisis, a voice from within breaks upon his startled conscience like the warn ing cry from the fatal cliff, flashing some message from the Word of God into his memory. He hears —hesitates—and turns back from the black abyss of sin. In the hour of his deadliest peril he has been saved by a voice! What though he does not remember, it was a message that you gave him away back in his boyhood days. What though he has forgotten you? The voice has saved his soul; that is enough. Hereby let us test our motives in His service,— “Would I rather have men forget my message and remember me; or forget me and remember my message?”
near his home, there was a crowd of people in the yard of his neighbor. He asked: “What’s the mat ter?” A man said: “Your neighbor has just fallen from a tree and been killed.” A sobering silence fell upon that body of men as they sat and looked into each others’ faces in the quiet hall. Every man’s heart went out in tender sympathy to the man who had resisted the call of the Spirit to the God-given man. LET US PRAY FOR THESE GOD-GIVEN MEN Sometimes it is the only thing to do. I think of the beloved brother of my home in past years, the only one I had. He was not a Christian. He was one of those difficult men to approach. I seemed to produce no effect in dealing with him. Finally I betook myself to earnest prayer. I prayed for five years, ten years, fifteen years. Then I began to realize that probably God would have to touch him with the hand of affliction before He could get him for Himself. I prayed on for twenty years. Then one day my fear was realized. Off on a vaca tion in the wilds of Canada, I received a message: “He whom thou lovest is sick.” I hastened to his bedside at a sanitarium. I was there a week. The whole burden of prayer came back with tremendous intensity. Day after day I prayed. One day I was on my knees in my room praying. There came a knock at my door. I opened it. There stood my sister-in-law. She said: “Brother, husband says do not worry. He believes he has been a Christian for three months.” The joy those words brought was unspeakable. After twenty years God there made clear to me that He had been hearing my prayer and had been working with mighty power all these years in the life of my brother. A year from that time he died. The last word he uttered when I said to him: “ Brother, are you trusting in Christ?” was “ Certainly.” That precious word of assurance, “ certainly,” was the last word I ever heard from the lips of my beloved brother, for whom I had prayed twenty years. You met them everywhere, these God-given men. They greet you with a smile on the side-walk; they settle down in your seat in the train or plane; they travel with you side by side on the golf links; they cross racquets with you on the tennis courts; they eat with you at the noonday lunch. They sor row with you in your grief, and rejoice with you in your joys. You have known them all your life and down deep in your heart there is a real tender love for these big hearted, companionable, happy- go-lucky fellows who seem to have everything that comes along in life except the one thing which you know to be the only thing that makes life so rich and precious for you, and that one thing—Je sus Christ. These hale friends of yours are one of God’s greatest gifts. They are God-given men to us, because we have a Treasure in life which is God’s unspeakable gift, and because they are “with
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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