Walking with God



 Walking with God will make death sweet. It was Augustus’ wish that he might have a euthanasia, a quiet, easy death without much pain. If anything makes our pillow easy at death it will be this, that we have walked with God in our generation. Do we think walking with God can do us any hurt? Did we ever hear any cry out on their deathbed that they have been too holy, that they have prayed too much, or walked with God too much? No, that which has cut them to the heart has been this, that they have not walked more closely with God; they have wrung their hands and torn their hair to think that they have been so bewitched with the pleasures of the world. Close walking with God will make our enemy (death) be at peace with us. When King Ahasuerus could not sleep, he called for the book of records, and read it (Esther 6:1). So when the violence of sickness causes sleep to depart from our eyes and we can call for conscience (that book of records) and find written in it, ‘On such a day we humbled our souls by fasting; on such a day our hearts melted in prayer; on such a day we had sweet communion with God’ – what a reviving this will be! How we may look death in the face with comfort and say, ‘Lord, now take us up to thee in heaven. Where we have so often been by affection let us now be by fruition.’. Walking with God is the best way to know the mind of God. Friends who walk together impart their secrets one to another: ‘The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him’ (Psa. 25:14). Noah walked with God and the Lord revealed a great secret to him – destroying the old world and saving him in the ark. Abraham walked with God, and God made him one of his privy council (Gen. 24:40): ‘Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?’ (Gen. 18:17). God sometimes sweetly unbosoms himself to the soul in prayer and in the holy supper, as Christ made himself known to the disciples in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:35).
 They who walk with God shall never be wholly left by God. The Lord may withdraw for a time, to make his people cry after him the more, but he will not leave them altogether: ‘I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee’ (Isa. 54:8). God will not cast off any of his old acquaintance; he will not part with one that has kept him company. ‘Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him’ (Gen. 5:24). He took him up to heaven. As the Arabic renders it, ‘Enoch was lodged in the bosom of divine love.’

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