Morning, July 11 Go To Evening Reading
“After that, ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.”
—1 Peter 5:10
You have seen the arch of heaven as it spans the plain: glorious are its colours and rare its hues. It is beautiful, but, alas, it passes away, and lo, it is not. The fair colours give way to the fleecy clouds, and the sky is no longer brilliant with the tints of heaven. It is not established. How can it be? A glorious show made up of transitory sunbeams and passing rain-drops, how can it abide? The graces of the Christian character must not resemble the rainbow in its transitory beauty, but, on the contrary, must be established, settled, abiding. Seek, O believer, that every good thing you have may be an abiding thing. May your character not be a writing upon the sand, but an inscription upon the rock! May your faith be no “baseless fabric of a vision,” but may it be built of material able to endure that awful fire which shall consume the wood, hay, and stubble of the hypocrite. May you be rooted and grounded in love. May your convictions be deep, your love real, your desires earnest. May your whole life be so settled and established, that all the blasts of hell and all the storms of earth shall never be able to remove you. But notice how this blessing of being “established in the faith” is gained. The apostle’s words point us to suffering as the means employed—“After that, ye have suffered awhile.” It is of no use to hope that we shall be well rooted if no rough winds pass over us. Those old gnarling's atop the root of the oak tree, and those strange twistings of the branches, all tell of the many storms that have swept over it, and they are also indicators of the depth into which the roots have forced their way. So the Christian is made strong and firmly rooted by all the trials and storms of life. Shrink not then from the tempestuous winds of trial, but take comfort, believing that by their rough discipline God is fulfilling this benediction to you.
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Go To Morning Reading Evening, July 11
“Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.”
—Joel 1:3
In this simple way, by
God’s grace, a living testimony for truth is always to be kept alive in the land—the beloved of the
Lord are to hand down their witness for the
gospel, and the covenant to their heirs, and these again to their next descendants. This is our first duty, we are to begin at the family hearth: he is a bad preacher who does not commence his ministry at home. The heathen are to be sought by all means, and the highways and hedges are to be searched, but home has a prior claim and woe unto those who reverse the order of the
Lord’s arrangements. To teach our children is a personal duty; we cannot delegate it to
Sunday school teachers, or other friendly aids; these can assist us, but cannot deliver us from the sacred obligation; proxies and sponsors are wicked devices in this case: mothers and fathers must, like Abraham, command their households in the fear of
God, and talk with their offspring concerning the wondrous works of the
Most High.
Parental teaching is a natural duty—who so fit to look to the child’s well-being as those who are the authors of his actual being? To neglect, the instruction of our offspring is worse than brutish.
Family religion is necessary for the nation, for the family itself, and for the church of
God. By a thousand plots, Popery is covertly advancing in our land, and one of the most effectual means for resisting its inroads is left almost neglected, namely, the instruction of children in the faith. Would that parents would awaken to a sense of the importance of this matter. It is a pleasant duty to talk about
Jesus to our sons and daughters, and the more so because it has often proved to be an accepted work, for
God has saved the children through the parents’ prayers and admonitions. May every house into which this volume shall come honour the
Lord and receive
his smile.
Spurgeon, Charles H. Morning and Evening: Daily Readings. Complete and unabridged; New modern edition. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006. Print.
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