Part 43 (1/2)

”Get thee, behind me, Satan” (Matt. xvi. 23).

When your old self comes back, if you listen to it, fear it, believe it, it will have the same influence upon you as if it were not dead; it will control you and destroy you. But if you will ignore it and say: ”You are not I, but Satan trying to make me believe that the old self is not dead; I refuse you, I treat you as a demon power outside of me, I detach myself from you”; if you treat it as a wife would her divorced husband, saying: ”You are nothing to me, you have no power over me, I have renounced you, in the name of Jesus I bid you hence,”-lo! the evil thing will disappear, the shadow will vanish, the wand of faith will lay the troubled spirit, and send it back to the abyss, and you will find that Christ is there instead, with His risen life, to back up your confidence and seal your victory.

Satan can stand anything better than neglect. If you ignore him he gets disgusted and disappears. Jesus used to turn His back upon him and say, ”Get thee behind Me, Satan.” So let us refuse him, and we shall find that he will be compelled to act according to our faith.

OCTOBER 15.

”Faith is the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. xi. 1).

True faith drops its letter in the post-office box, and lets it go.

Distrust holds on to a corner of it, and wonders that the answer never comes.

I have some letters in my desk that have been written for weeks, but there was some slight uncertainty about the address or the contents, so they are yet unmailed. They have not done either me or anybody else any good yet.

They will never accomplish anything until I let them go out of my hands and trust them to the postman and the mail.

This is the case with true faith. It hands its case over to G.o.d, and then He works.

That is a fine verse in the thirty-seventh Psalm: ”Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in Him, and He worketh.” But He never worketh until we commit.

Faith is a receiving, or still better, a taking of G.o.d's proffered gifts.

We may believe, and come, and commit, and rest, but we will not fully realize all our blessing until we begin to receive and come into the att.i.tude of abiding and taking.

OCTOBER 16.

”Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, I will make thee a joy” (Isa.

lx. 15).

G.o.d loves to take the most lost of men, and make them the most magnificent memorials of His redeeming love and power. He loves to take the victims of Satan's hate, and the lives that have been the most fearful examples of his power to destroy, and to use them to ill.u.s.trate and illuminate the possibilities of Divine mercy and the new creations of the Holy Spirit.

He loves to take the things in our own lives that have been the worst, the hardest and the most hostile to G.o.d, and to transform them so that we shall be the opposites of our former selves.

The sweetest spirits are made out of the most stormy and self-willed, the mightiest faith is created out of a wilderness of doubts and fears, and the Divinest love is transformed out of stony hearts of hate and selfishness.

The grace of G.o.d is equal to the most uncongenial temperaments, to the most unfavorable circ.u.mstances; and its glory is to transform a curse into blessing, and show to men and angels of ages yet to come, that ”where sin abounded, there grace did much more abound.”

OCTOBER 17.