Milo

August 23rd

Prayer choice and prayer conflict

When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and pray to thy Father which is in secret. Matthew 6:6.

Jesus did not say—‘Dream about thy Father in secret,’ but ‘pray to thy Father in secret.’ Prayer is an effort of will. After we have entered our secret place and have shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot get our minds into working order, and the first thing that conflicts is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is the overcoming of mental wool-gathering. We have to discipline our minds and concentrate on wilful prayer.
We must have a selected place for prayer and when we get there the plague of flies begins—This must be done, and that. “Shut thy door.” A secret silence means to shut the door deliberately on emotions and remember God. God is in secret, and He sees us from the secret place; He does not see us as other people see us, or as we see ourselves. When we live in the secret place it becomes impossible for us to doubt God, we become more sure of Him than of anything else. Your Father, Jesus says, is in secret and nowhere else. Enter the secret place, and right in the centre of the common round you find God there all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.

August 23

“He went out, not knowing whither he went.” (Heb. 11:8.)

IT is faith without sight. When we can see, it is not faith, but reasoning. In crossing the Atlantic we observed this very principle of faith. We saw no path upon the sea, nor sign of the shore. And yet day by day we were marking our path upon the chart as exactly as if there had followed us a great chalk line upon the sea. And when we came within twenty miles of land, we knew where we were as exactly as if we had seen it all three thousand miles ahead.
How had we measured and marked our course? Day by day our captain had taken his instruments and, looking up to the sky, had fixed his course by the sun. He was sailing by the heavenly, not the earthly lights.
So faith looks up and sails on, by God’s great Sun, not seeing one shore line or earthly lighthouse or path upon the way. Often its steps seem to lead into utter uncertainty, and even darkness and disaster; but He opens the way, and often makes such midnight hours the very gates of day. Let us go forth this day, not knowing, but trusting.—Days of Heaven upon Earth.
“Too many of us want to see our way through before starting new enterprises. If we could and did, from whence would come the development of our Christian graces? Faith, hope and love cannot be plucked from trees, like ripe apples. After the words ‘In the beginning’ comes the word ‘God.’ The first step turns the key into God’s power-house, and it is not only true that God helps those who help themselves, but He also helps those who cannot help themselves. You can depend upon Him every time.”
“Waiting on God brings us to our journey’s end quicker than our feet.”
The opportunity is often lost by deliberation.

23 AUGUST

Delivered from bondage

‘And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.’ Genesis 15:12–14
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: 1 Kings 8:54–61

The Lord, in this chapter, confirmed his covenant with Abraham by repeated promises and by signs—suited to establish his faith, and likewise for the instruction of his church in succeeding times. A deep sleep fell upon him (his bodily senses were overpowered, but his soul was awake to the visions of God) and a horror of darkness—an emblem of the afflictions his posterity was to meet with and of the dispensations of the law they were to be subject to.
Here Abraham is informed of:
(i) their trouble. They were to possess the land but first they were to suffer in bondage. When the time of the promise drew nigh he found them in misery and slavery—thus he made himself known as their deliverer. So it is with all the Lord’s people. He has appointed them an inheritance, but they are for a season in the enemies’ hands.
(ii) God’s vengeance on their enemies: I will judge them. The Lord will plead his people’s cause and then they shall come forth with victory and honour.

FOR MEDITATION:
JOHN NEWTON, CLERK,
Once an Infidel and Libertine,
A servant of slaves in Africa,
Was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour
JESUS CHRIST,
Preserved, restored, pardoned,
And appointed to preach the Faith
He had long laboured to destroy.
Epitaph, by John Newton

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 33 [1/2], GENESIS 15:17

August 22nd

“I indeed … but He”

I indeed baptize you with water … but He … shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire. Matthew 3:11.

Have I ever come to a place in my experience where I can say—“I indeed … but He”? Until that moment does come, I will never know what the baptism of the Holy Ghost means. “I indeed” am at an end, I cannot do a thing: “but He” begins just there—He does the things no one else can ever do. Am I prepared for His coming? Jesus cannot come as long as there is anything in the way either of goodness or badness. When He comes am I prepared for Him to drag into the light every wrong thing I have done? It is just there that He comes. Wherever I know I am unclean, He will put His feet; wherever I think I am clean, He will withdraw them. Repentance does not bring a sense of sin, but a sense of unutterable unworthiness. When I repent, I realize that I am utterly helpless; I know all through me that I am not worthy even to bear His shoes. Have I repented like that? Or is there a lingering suggestion of standing up for myself? The reason God cannot come into my life is because I am not through into repentance.
“He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire.” John does not speak of the baptism of the Holy Ghost as an experience, but as a work performed by Jesus Christ, “He shall baptize you.” The only conscious experience those who are baptized with the Holy Ghost ever have is a sense of absolute unworthiness.
“I indeed” was this and that;”but He” came, and a marvellous thing happened. Get to the margin where He does everything.

August 22

“And the rest, some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass that they escaped all safe to land.” (Acts 27:44.)

THE marvelous story of Paul’s voyage to Rome, with its trials and triumphs, is a fine pattern of the lights and shades of the way of faith all through the story of human life. The remarkable feature of it is the hard and narrow places which we find intermingled with God’s most extraordinary interpositions and providences.
It is the common idea that the pathway of faith is strewn with flowers, and that when God interposes in the life of His people, He does it on a scale so grand that He lifts us quite out of the plane of difficulties. The actual fact, however, is that the real experience is quite contrary. The story of the Bible is one of alternate trial and triumph in the case of everyone of the cloud of witnesses from Abel down to the latest martyr.
Paul, more than anyone else, was an example of how much a child of God can suffer without being crushed or broken in spirit. On account of his testifying in Damascus, he was hunted down by persecutors and obliged to fly for his life, but we behold no heavenly chariot transporting the holy apostle amid thunderbolts of flame from the reach of his foes, but “through a window in a basket,” was he let down over the walls of Damascus and so escaped their hands. In an old clothes basket, like a bundle of laundry, or groceries, the servant of Jesus Christ was dropped from the window and ignominiously fled from the hate of his foes.
Again we find him left for months in the lonely dungeons; we find him telling of his watchings, his fastings, and his desertion by friends, of his brutal and shameful beatings, and here even after God has promised to deliver him, we see him for days left to toss upon a stormy sea, obliged to stand guard over the treacherous seaman, and at last when the deliverance comes, there is no heavenly galley sailing from the skies to take off the noble prisoner; there is no angel form walking along the waters and stilling the raging breakers; there is no supernatural sign of the transcendent miracle that is being wrought; but one is compelled to seize a spar, another a floating plank, another to climb on a fragment of the wreck, another to strike out and swim for his life.
Here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this every day world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.
God’s promises and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our every day experience.—Hard Places in the Way of Faith.