Restoration

THE RESTORATION-
But let us change our theme. Are we assuming too much in supposing that the Holy Spirit has interposed His power to arrest your wandering- to reveal to you your declension- and has awakened the cry in your heart- "Oh that it were with me as in days that are past, when the candle of the Lord shone round about me!"? If this be so, then chant to the plaintive note of the sweet songster- "He RESTORES my soul."
WHO is the Restorer, but the Shepherd, whose the sheep are, and from whom they have wandered! There is but one Being who would or could go in quest of the stray sheep- traversing the bleak mountains and the lonely valleys, and the dark, stormy night, until He finds it, bringing it back upon His shoulder rejoicing. Christ alone knows the existence and extent of our heart-declensions- our soul-backslidings. With His hand upon the pulse- His eye upon the heart- acquainted with every fluctuating thought and emotion of the soul- who so fitted as He to seek and restore the wanderer from His fold? Oh what a throb of gratitude should beat in our hearts at the thought that Jesus knows us altogether- all our infirmities, and all our graces- all our declensions, and all our revivings- when the pulse of love beats faintly-or when, in the sincerity of our hearts, we can appeal to His Omniscience, and exclaim- "You know that I love You!" "I know my sheep."
And what an evidence of the restoring grace of Jesus, and of David's restoration, do we possess in the fifty-first Psalm! Oh, it is a Psalm which should be read and pondered every day of the Christian's life! for there is no Psalm which so fully embodies and expresses the experience of the man of God as it. It is a portion upon which a child of God can lay his dying head, and depart peacefully. This was the experience of one distinguished for his gifts, eminent for his usefulness, and honored above many in the Church of God. When the time of his departure had come, and his life and labors passed in solemn review as from a dying bed, the only portion of God's word that seemed the most appropriately and fully to embody and express the humble feelings and prayerful utterances of his mind, and to impart comfort and peace to his departing spirit in the near prospect of eternity, was this penitential Psalm of David, so expressive of the feelings of a contrite soul- the acknowledgment of sin- the washing of the blood- restored joy- and renewed consecration to God.

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