THE KING’S BUSINESS
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a wonderful description of him. We read of him as a roaring lion. We have ministers today who preach heresy and damning delusive doc trines. They deny the fact of a devil. “They m ay say the devil h as never lived, They m ay say the devil has gone, B ut simple folks would like to know Who carries th e business on.” I would rather have the devil bark ing at my heels than to have him play ing ’possum. And it is only when we keep on our knees and commune with God that we are able to overcome him. I was never more grieved than last summer, when I had an opportunity of going to a number of churches and listening to men preach. There were times when it took all the grace of God to keep me from getting up and telling the preacher that he was a liar. I never heard the death of Jesus Christ put in such a subtle, unscrip- tural way as I heard these men put it. They said that Christ’s death was only the highest devotion and loyalty to tru th ; that it was the greatest manifestation of His love to God, but there was no vicarious suffering. They did not put it plainly like that, but in their cultured and refined way they would say: “We must imitate Christ and His works; we must be as loyal to God and good even to death, as He w a s a n d much in a like strain, and as a result we are raising up a set of men and women that are in the church and as truly going to hell as the devil himself. And then we read that the devil is a sifter, just as you sift your ashes. Well, thank God, the only things he can rid us of are the things that are unnecessary. Then he is a tormentor and torments all he can. He torments us by discouragement. He gets our eyes off God and on to second causes. We only see the enemies and mis takes instead of seeing God working all things together for our good and as a consequence we become discour-
the camp. When you are out against the foe you are in for victory, but whenever you have the Saturday aft ernoon off; when you have your even ings free and the Sunday free, and when there is nobody watching you, and you are away from the public gaze, and you are alone, there is where the danger lies, and that is where the world generally overcomes so many Christians. It is in the so cial relations of their lives, in the luxuries, not in the necessities of life that the danger lies. Our second enemy is the flesh. It is the body that you and I live in, and until the day we die we will always be living in this body, and the body has been so wrecked by sin, that desires have been perverted. The ordinary appetites and passions have been altogether abused by sin. We were born alto gether wrong and as a result you and I are always sitting right on top of a safety valve. We are always living on the mouth of a volcano, and if it were not for the grace of God we would go up any moment. The body is a grand servant, but it is a most tyrannical master when it gets the upper hand, and yet, my friends, in our Christian lives isn’t it the flesh that is overcoming so many? Many a man today would be a fine Christian if you could only put him in a new body. A man’s lust for money, lust for worldly pleasure; lust for power, are always clamoring, and we must always be on our guard. They tell us today to cultivate our bodies, and cultivate our aesthetic senses, but the Bible says to crucify and mortify them. t h e d e v il is o u r OTHER EOE, And then again, the other foe we have is the devil himself. These are days when people do not believe so much in the devil, but the Bible gives
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