The Quiet Time

Faith

I know not the way that's before me,

The joys or the griefs it may bring;

What clouds are o'er hanging the future,

What flowers by the wayside may spring.

But there's One who will journey beside me,

Nor in weal nor in woe will forsake,

And this is my solace and comfort,

"He knoweth the way that I take."

Happiness

The early Franciscans were so happy that they laughed aloud in Church. They were called God's glee men. The early Methodists stole some of their best hymn tunes from the opera, and set the songs of Zion to dance music.

My God, I am Thine, What a comfort Divine!

And my soul it doth dance at the sound of Thy Name.

A man who met the Cliff College evangelists on the beach at Clacton-on-Sea, and who was converted through their ministry, said that their holiness was of the "radiant, rollicking" type. The early-day Salvationists danced for joy. William Booth said that if the Spirit moved them they could leap for joy in hymn or prayer. And they did.

Family Love

It is in His Church that God's heart may be said specially to be, there it unfolds itself in a way such as it can do amid no other order of His creatures. There it shows itself in all its manifold fulness such as it has no scope for elsewhere. It is in the family alone that the one thing we call affection or love is divided and spread out like a sunbeam into the rainbow's sevenfold hues, there to display itself in all the rich tints of hidden beauty. So it is in the church alone that the love of God is fully seen, not merely in all its intensity, but in all its varied riches. All kinds of love are unfolded there, there is room for such wide variety of affection both between the Head and the members and between the members one with the other that it seems as if there had been given new powers of loving as well as new objects to love.

SELF-CONTROL

Who, of experience, does not know how great a matter a little fire may kindle; how much evil may be started by the fire of the tongue; how many unkind thoughts, evil suspicions, surmises, how much envy, malice, hatred and strife may be started by a mere insinuation? Since the Lord declares, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks," it follows that the hearts and lips, from which emanate these evil influences are not controlled by the wisdom that cometh from above, though they be in some measure consecrated to the Lord.

Spiritual Vision

We have to-day in the advancement of art, in the increase of wealth, in better homes and better furnishings. in improved roads and landscapes and more artistic clothing, in pictures and music and conveniences and wider business prospects and opportunities, in the conveniences of mail, telegraph and telephone — in all these things we have a hundred-fold more to attract our minds and ambitions and desires to the earth and earthly things than had our forefathers of even a century ago. How needful it was that the Lord should open simultaneously to His faithful a clearer understanding of His Word and plan — of the riches of His grace and his loving kindness toward us. His wonderful provisions, that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of the natural man, but God has revealed unto us by His Spirit.

Spirit-Filled

The Greeks used the word euphoria to express an immense sense of well being. The true euphoria is seen in a puppy which rolls over on the ground for the very joy of being alive; in the lambs gambolling in the fields; in a colt galloping along beside its mother; and in children who skip, dance and run because they cannot keep still. This is the true euphoria; and, we believe, should be the portion of those filled with all the fullness of God. Old age comes on far too speedily. The radiant morn of life is the continuous possession of those who are Spirit-filled.

(Reprinted from April 1950)