A Goodly Heritage

"A new heart also will I give you. Then shall ye remember your own evil ways" (Ezek. 36:26,31). The prophet says that the memory of our badness only comes after we have become good. "A new heart will I give you; then shall ye remember your own evil ways." One would have expected the opposite statement. We should have looked for such words as these: "You must expect for a little to be troubled with old memories. You must not be surprised, when you are in the first stage of reformation, to experience the remorse of conscience for bad deeds in the past. When your new nature is complete, when the weaning process is over, when you become accustomed to the corn of the land, you will forget all about your struggles and failures; you will remember your shortcomings no more." The prophet says it is only then you will remember them. He says the valleys of your life will not become visible until you have scaled the height and stood upon the mountain's brow. And ...

"There was given to me a thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7). "There was given to me…" Can, then, the thorn be a gift from God? I am in the habit of seeing God’s gifts in the abundance of the things which my life possesses, and I call those things the dangers of life which diminish the sum of its abundance. But here there is a complete reversal of my thought; the abundance is the danger, and that which diminishes it is the gift. Paul has been exalted above measure; he has been standing on the heights of prosperity, and summering in the sunshine of a cloudless day. The cloudlessness of the day is his greatest danger, and there is sent a mist over the sun. His spiritual life has been fragrant with the breath of flowers. The thorn is, for the time, God’s best gift to his soul; there is something protective in it. It has no fragrance, it has no beauty, but it yields one of the sweetest uses of adversity—it reminds a human spirit that it is, after all, only human. ...

Was he a miracle--this little Samuel? No--in the view characteristic of the Bible he is the real and normal aspect of humanity. So normal is he that Christ says we must all return to his state before we can become seers. What, think you, does Jesus mean when He declares that we can only realise the beauty of the Kingdom through the eyes of a little child? Is it not simply this, that to see the beauty of anything we require a first eye? Take the Bible itself. To see the beauties of the Bible, one would require to say to us what the prophet said to Hezekiah, “Let the shadow go back ten degrees.” We should need to be transported back into life’s morning, to divest ourselves of all preconceived opinions, to imagine that we were reading the record for the first time. That is precisely the standpoint which Christianity promises to create. It professes to make old things new, in other words, to let us see the old things as they looked when they were new, and so to give us a true sense of ...

In the days when the High Priest Eli was judge of Israel, there appeared in the sanctuary of Shiloh a wonderful child: his name was Samuel. It was a dark and stormy time; there were fears within and fightings without. Israel was climbing a steep hill--arduously, painfully. Her progress was slow; she was alternately worsted and victorious. And the struggle was more arduous from the fact that there was no prophecy. It was an age of materialism. The hands of Moses were no longer uplifted on the mountain; the eyes of Moses no longer gazed on a promised glory. Religion had become a form; its spirit had fled. There were few remains left of that heroic time when Joshua had fought for God, and Deborah had sung for God. The nation had lost its poetry, and had lost its faith, these had to be rekindled anew at the lamp of heaven. Where was the new kindling to begin? Where was the Divine spirit to touch the world once more? In the heart of the sage? No. In the breast of the old man? No. In the...