August 1929
368
T h e
K i n g ' s
B u s i n e s s
He said: “Doctor, you know you and I have never seen alike concerning the Bible and Jesus Christ. But I am dying, and I am in the dark. Can’t you help me ?” I asked him how it happened that he had wandered so far away from the teaching of his childhood. He said: “When I started to college, my mother gave me a Bible. I read it some, for a few months, but one of my professors taught that the Bible was a myth—that the whole Book was a fraud. I came to my room one night, after hearing a minis ter appeal to a body of students to believe in Jesus Christ. I was much impressed. I got out the Bible my mother gave me. It lay open on my table, and I said : ‘It cannot be true. I know my mother believed it, but my mother never went to college, and she accepted it just on faith. The professor has, or is supposed to have, weighed all the evi dence on the subject, and he says the Bible is a fraud. He must be right. I will accept the evolutionary hypothesis, and give up the Bible.’ But,” said he, “I am dying, and I am not satisfied. Can’t you help me?” I said: “Doctor, let us go back to those college days. You are in your room. You have come from the church where you heard the minister plead. Will you not open your little Bible again? Now say with me, if you will, ‘Perhaps it is true after all, and God helping me, I will take the Bible, with its story of the cross—I will take the Christ of the Bible as a working hypothesis!’ ” He raised up in his bed, and with all the earnestness of his soul, cried ou t: “You have got me, s ir ! I will!” No man ever accepted the story of the Bible as a working hypothesis, who had a doubt for a dying pillow! The Bible fits! Try it! i n Spiritual Selfishness "Have I eaten my morsel alone?” This was Job’s reflection when looking back upon his past life, and it was a comfort to him to remember that he had always shared his morsel with others. The literal application is simple enough. It touches the principle of selfishness and explains the reason why many a life surrounded with affluence is unsatisfied and unblessed. It has vainly sought to heap up to itself the thick clay of earthly pleasures and possessions, and forgotten that the only secret of happiness is unselfish love. But there is a spiritual application. Have you eaten your morsel of spiritual blessing yourself alone? Have you taken the precious blood-bought salvation of Jesus Christ as a personal luxury and forgotten that it is a sacred trust? Have your prayers been centered upon you and yours? Has life revolved around the radius of your own petty little world of interest and affection? Or have you learned the glorious secret that everything that God gives is a trust to be passed on to others, and to multiply in our hands as we scatter it? The useless luxury of Christians would give the Gos pel to the world in a single year. The idle and unhappy drones in the Church of Jesus Christ could encompass the globe with the Gospel of salvation and. bring the millen nium in a generation if they were only redeemed from spiritual selfishness. Let us ask ourselves Job’s question, “Have I eaten my morsel alone?” And as God continues to bless us with “all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” let us take the blessing, but let us give it as freely as we receive i t ; let us hear Him say, “Go thy way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to them for whom nothing is prepared.”—A . B. Simpson.
love o f God, that God sent His only begotten Son, that we might live through Him.” The Son-of God took my place. He suffered the pen alty for my sin. We may be,saved in the justice of God! He could not, out of supreme love for man, pardon his transgressions. To deny the atoning work of Christ, is to attack the integrity of God. Someone had to suffer. “The wages o f sin is death.” If my soul is to live, and not die, the Son of God must die in my place- The Bible says that He did. That satisfies! What am I worth? Without a revelation, my worth must be expressed in language of dollars and cents. Is there no other way to determine my worth? When I look into the pages of this Bible and ask the question, the an swer comes to me with sweet satisfaction: “You are worth dying for” ! The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ shall “see the travail of His soul and be satisfied.” He will be satisfied in u s ! .He did not die for nothing. There was no waste in our redemption. He saw something in a redeemed soul far beyond the value placed upon man in the marts of the world. Because of this ideal of the worth of man, the best and bravest men and women in all the earth, during nineteen centuries, have gone out to lay down their lives as stepping stones in the brook of time, that upon them the Son of God might walk in His tri umphant progress around the world! A man is worth the Son of God dying for! That satisfies. Where am I going? What is beyond? Ingersoll said: “We lift our voices in the silence of the night, only to hear the echo of their cry.” That is infidelity a t’its best! What more can be said, by anyone, if God has not spoken? If there is no revelation from God on the subject, then the thing to do at every grave, is to deliver IngersolFs ora tion, have the choir sing “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,” fill up the grave, and turn away with a heavy heart! I challenge the Modernist to produce a ray of hope for life after death, if the Bible is “simply and only the history of man’s search after God” ! But the Bible gives a ground of hope! I have seen the dear old mother die. She said: “Children, I am dying, and I want you to help me sing the twenty-third Psalm, as I pass into the glory.” And if you had heard her sing on the brink of eternity, you could not have believed that her life had been “but a barren vale between the cold and ice-clad peaks of two eternities.” You would not have believed that she was striving “in vain to look beyond the heights,” or that she was lifting her voice “in the silence of the night, only to hear the echo of her cry” ! No! No! It seemed that even death paused for a moment to listen to the song of the saint: The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want. He makes me down to lie In pastures green, He leadeth me The quiet waters by. My soul He doth restore again, And me to walk doth make Within the paths of righteousness, Ev’n for His own name’s sake. . Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale, Yet will I fear no ill, For Thou art with me and Thy rod And staff, me comfort still. Goodness and mercy all my life, Shall surely follow me, And in God’s house forevermore, My dwelling place shall be. You cannot find that any place but in the Bible! It satisfies! A few years ago, I visited my old family physician. I had heard that he was dying. I went into the sickroom.
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