1. “K. P. S.,” Hammersmith. Your mention of Christians meeting together to play games quite shocks us. Such entirely mistake what the Christian’s vocation and position are. That bodily exercise is good, and even necessary for health is true enough, but there are surely ways of obtaining it without indulging in the world’s frivolities and pleasures. Such conduct indicates a very low condition of soul, even if they are partakers of eternal life in Christ. The only remedy is the apprehension in their souls of the infinite glory, fullness, excellencies, and accomplished redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is said of a celebrated man that he was literally blind for some time after looking at the sun, and it is no less true that when the heart is really taken up with the Lord Jesus, we become blind to the world’s attractions, and also deaf to its charms. After all, we fear it is the company rather than the game which is often the point of attraction, and sometimes forms an easy and certain way of drawing young Christians back into the world they have professed to have been rescued from by the death of Christ. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” is a very solemn scripture. If a Christian let slip the sense of his relationship to the Father, his walk soon loses its distinctive and separate character. The world under Satan has ten thousand ways of drawing him into its vortex. May the Lord graciously restore such souls! We fear there are many so ensnared.
2. “D. L.” Two things, dear friend, are clear from your letter. First, that you have not taken your true place before God as a lost, undone, guilty sinner; and secondly, that the Lord Jesus Christ is not with you the object of faith—your way to God, your life and righteousness, through whose blood alone you have remission of sins according to the word of God. Be assured, that till these things are known to you as great realities, you can never be truly happy, or have power over sin and Satan. Your being self-occupied only shows that self is before you as an object, and not Christ, because of the misery you speak of; for a self-occupied person, with a conscience about sin, must be most miserable. Self has no power over sin, or to resist Satan. Christ overcame Satan by “It is written.”
Our heart’s desire and prayer to God is that your mind’s eye may be taken off yourself and your sins, and that you may look straight to the Lord Jesus, who a has entered into heaven itself by his own blood,” as the alone object of your heart’s trust, your only way to God. Thus coming to God by Him, and relying upon His written word, you will not only have peace, but power. We read when one in bitter anguish of soul cried out, “Ο wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” he looked off self, straight to the Lord Jesus, and could then peacefully say, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” May this soon be the happy state of your soul, and many others in a similar condition, is our earnest prayer to God!
3. “Buxton.” The paper, The Sanctuary and the Sea, has been printed in the form of a little book, and may be had of the publishers, 20, Paternoster Square.
Several answers are unavoidably postponed for want of space.