October 1931
T h e
K i n g ’ s
435
B u s i n e s s
rumL from THE KING’S TABLE . . . By THE EDITOR
Do You Ever Sigh or Cry?
the Sermon on the Mount. •I find no awakening there. I find great principles, lofty ideals, severe standards, great moral maxims. I bask in the soft, sunny inspiration of the encouragements. I tremble amid the lightning flashes of appalling warnings. My incompleteness yawns before me. All my defects are ragged and jagged in the burning noon, but I do not feel' ashamed of the pain and the hor ribleness and the fearfulness of my sin. It is not other wise when I turn even to the story of the prodigal son.
© o through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.” If a mark should be set upon all “that sigh and that cry” for the sin of the world, upon how many of our
foreheads would the man with the ink- horn set his mark? Did you ever cry over the spiritual condition, of your family, your neighbors, your city, or the world? Are you ever crushed and bur dened by the horrors of sin? Is it the subject of your prayers? Is it the bur den of your sighs? Does it ever cause you the loss of an hour’s sleep? Or is sin an unaffrighting and undisturbing commonplace with which you have be come so familiar that it never startles you into pain? If sin has become a com monplace, our teaching and preaching has become a plaything. If we do not feel its horrors, we shall lose the start ling clarion of the watchman; there will be no urgency in our speech, no vehe mence, no sense of imperious haste. If we think lightly of the disease, we will loiter on the way to the physician. If we do not feel the heat of the consum ing and destructive presence of sin, we will not labor with undivided zeal to pluck our fellow men as brands from the burning fire. If our sense of sin is lax, we may find in that laxity one of the great est causes of our ineffective testimony. I am not surprised that, in his enu
I may be melted into tears, and yet my tears may not help my vision. Many a man has been made homesick by the story of the prodigal, but he has not been made sick of his sin. What I want is not merely-something that will make me homesick, but something that will reveal to me the hatefulness of sin, the leperous disgustingness of sin, that I may not only turn away home, but that I may recoil from sin in contempt, as a healthy man turns from some diseases and frorti disgusting foods. I do not see or fear my sin in the Sermon on the Mount, nor do I fear it in the story of the prodigal son. But when I stand at the cross, when I lift my eyes to the crucified Son of God, when I recall the words that He spoke: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”—in the love that blazed in death, I can see something of the sin for which He died. I see it as I see it nowhere else. When I stand at the cross, I am, in my measure, permitted to see sin through the eyes of my God. The cross is the place of great awakening for sin ners. Nowhere else can I get the pain and the shame and the fear of sin a w a k e n e d at the cross.
To abide in the presence of God, until even knowledge of facts is saturated with passion for souls, until the burden of a dying world rolls on us so heavily that the only way to bear is to bear it with Him who bore it up to the cross—that is to find a whole night of prayer a rest and a relief. —A. T. P ierson . which I find
meration of the graces of a sanctified life, the apostle should put in the primary place a heart of pity: “Put ye on compassion.” Compassion is a part of the essential equipment of every true witness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it is the part of our equipment which may be most easily and carelessly destroyed. The Gospel of Grace and the Sense of Sin ny doctrine which unveils the holiness of God re veals also the horribleness of sin. If God were merely the easy-going, good-natured, lax and kind ly deity of many modern worshipers, sin would remain forever essentially unrevealed. If God would merely bend over His rebellious children, and say: “My children, I forgive you,” that might ease us, but it would never make us good. Forgiveness is a counterfeit if it decorates the sin it forgives. Such forgiveness only paves the way for a repetition of the offense. Where do we best see the horrors of sin ? They are seen where forgiveness is most truly revealed. I turn to m
Is Your Window Open? B aniel prospered very well in exile and had risen to remarkable power; but chains aré still chains, how ever they be guilded, and Daniel was a prisoner in Babylon. He would never again cross the fords of Jor dan, nor would he ever look again upon the holy city of Jerusalem. His prospects of return were hopeless. He was doomed to a perpetual separation. Yet, though all hope of seeing Jerusalem was vanished, we read that he opened his windows toward Jerusalem; and that his heart yearned as he prayed a't those open windows three .times a day. Every child of God, who is striving to live nobly, is struggling after things he can not reach. He has his Jeru salem ; but it is far away, and he knows that he will not see it on this side of the grave. Dimly, and as in mystical distance, he has grown conscious of an ideal character; but the failure and the flaw of every day, the, recurrent weakness, and the unbridled heart tell him too plainly
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