I have been often asked to speak of the ways of God to me, and how He has led me, but I would far rather speak of Him. I know in my life “He has done all things well.” He has borne with me with long-suffering grace in my wild and willful days. I have often wronged Him by faithlessness and backsliding, but the love that saves is ours forever.
To think of one’s own life is to think of failure after failure; to think of Him is to say, “Mercy from first to last.” We know that what we have done for Him is written upon the archives of everlasting remembrance, and what we have done to please ourselves, or simply to impress others, will feed the flames of oblivion.
One thing God, by His Spirit has always enabled me to do, and that is to justify Him in every circumstance of my life, and to be able to say to my blessed Lord, even in times of greatest failure and regret, “Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee.”
The Ways of God. It was His way to give me most godly parents, and to answer their prayers for my salvation when I was a boy of nine. He has allowed me to stay in His service for more than fifty years. My godly father passed away when my gospel work was at its height (1887). His wonderful life for God, and his wonderful departure to be with Christ, abide with me as a sacred remembrance after more than thirty years.
When the summons came to call him to eternity, almost suddenly, he said, “I have not a doubt, I have not a fear.” I never saw such radiant happiness as was his in speaking to, and about, the Lord Jesus. “Is it not wonderful,” he said, “Though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich.” With rapt and adoring face turned to heaven he communed with the Lord in the most exalted prayer and thanksgiving. “Sing,” he cried―
“Glory, glory, everlasting,
Be to Him who bore the cross;
Who redeemed our souls by tasting
Death―the death deserved by us.
Spread His glory,
Who redeemed His people thus.”
We sang the verse, and he joined feebly, clasping his bands. Then we stopped, but the weak voice began the second verse―
“His is love, ‘tis love unbounded,
Without measure, without end;
Human thought is here confounded,
‘Tis too vast to comprehend.
Praise the Saviour,
Magnify the sinner’s friend.”
He cheered our devoted mother with many words of God, and expressions of affection. Like one of the old patriarchs, he blessed each one of his sons and daughters, as they knelt beside his bed, and then passed weeping from the room. At another time when all his children and their mother stood around him as he lay, he said, looking from one to the other, with lips moving in prayer, “Forever altogether, forever altogether.” God grant it may be so, and to children’s children.
He said to me, “I should have liked to have stayed a little longer to help you in your work for God”―and no one knows the help he was to me but God―and then he prayed again, as he was always doing, for the work at the Victoria Hall: “God bless Thy servant in the Victoria Hall. Bless him, and keep him and sustain him.” Then he turned to me and said, “You will be sustained, you have His own word, and your desire is for His glory.” How these words have helped me, spoken in their solemn reality, God alone knows. They have been proved true a thousand times, and they will be to the end, I am sure.
I shall speak more about my father’s help in my work another time (D.V.).
Eleven years after my father’s departure, my mother passed away. All her children were there to watch her pass from earth to heaven. “Are you very happy, darling mother?” one said to her. “Yes,” was the faint reply.
One of the dearest memories of our childhood was the sound of our mother’s voice singing in the home the hymns she loved so well. And at her passing we sang them to her just before she entered heaven.
“How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,
In a believer’s ear;
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.”
But the one most often on her lips was this—
“O Lord, Thy love’s unbounded,
So sweet, so full, so free;
My soul is all transported,
Whene’er I think of Thee.”
Oh! hallowed songs of Zion! We were singing her home to heaven, who had spent her days and nights in making life one sweet song for us. And then with the shining of the eternal dawn in those loving eyes, how near heaven seemed to all of us! The light of recognition of things eternal was deepening as earth faded, but the loving hand responded to the touch of love to the very end. With faltering voices we sang,
“Forever with the Lord!
Amen! so let it be;
Life from the dead is in that word,
‘Tis immortality.”
I love to think of the simplicity of her faith in Christ. Naturally nervous, she had prayed for an easy departure, and also that she might be restful and patient, and the prayers were answered indeed. Truly a beloved wife and mother.
A Prize At School
When I was a boy at school, about fifteen, I gained a prize, and my master had written in it, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” (Eccl. 9:1010Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)).
As he gave me the prize, he repeated the words, and said, “You will get on well if you do what the text bids you.” And our blessed Lord, our Great Exampler, says, “I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work” (John 9:44I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. (John 9:4)).
Our work must be done in the day―the day of opportunity-while “the fields are white to the harvest” we must work. With Christ coming at any moment, we must work. The night cometh when no man can work. When we leave this world we shall rise to heaven, thank God, and leave the night of the world’s sin behind us. The night cometh―of judgment for the world — and none of us can work then.
Many of us feel that the labors of the day in which we work may soon be over. Canon Knox Little says: “By waning power, by failing health, by weakening memory, you find in some way or other that the finger of God is touching you. The world may not see it; friends may not read it; those who are dear to you may not tell it; but you know it―the witness, whatever it is, is come. It speaks to you in the silence of the night. It wakens with you when you waken in the morning; it travels with you as a settled consciousness, when you are going about the world; it is the whisper of that unrelenting law of unchanging changefulness― ‘the night is coming.’”
The night as regards the work, but the glory for the worker. Then let Christ speak to us this year, “Occupy till I come.” If in our days of greater strength God let us work for Him, now with the failing bodily powers “may the joy of the Lord be our strength,” and “may His strength be made perfect in our weakness.” A Christian’s work for Christ on earth should only cease when life ceases, and after death, if God will, he may speak still.
My dear friends, I hope what I have said is for the glory of God. I wish you all a happy New Year. May it be the happiest you have ever known, made happy by the peace of God, through your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
I may speak more of The Ways of God another time.
H. W.