Looking unto JESUS, Author Finisher of our faith
"Then
I said, I
am cast out of Thy
sight; yet I will look again toward Thy
holy temple."
-JONAH
2:4 [KJV]
When
poor Jonah spake these words he uttered them in the very bitterness
of his heart; he felt that he was cast out of God's gracious
presence. But he must have known something experimentally of the
sweetness of God's manifested presence; he must have tasted that
heaven was in it, and that all his happiness centered there. He must
have enjoyed this in order to know if God's presence were not felt in
the soul, there was but one barren scene of gloom and death; and that
to be "cast out of His sight" was the commencement of hell
upon earth. Now here a living soul differs from all others, whether
dead in sin, or dead in a profession. The persuasion that in God
alone is true happiness; the feeling of misery and dissatisfaction
with everything else but the Lord, and everything short of His
manifested presence, is that which stamps the reality of the life of
God in a man's soul. Mere professors of religion feel no misery,
dissatisfaction, or wretchedness, if God shine not upon them.
So
long as the world smiles, and they have all that heart can wish, so
long as they are buoyed up by the hypocrite's hope, and lulled asleep
by the soft breezes of flattery, they are well satisfied to sail down
the stream of a dead profession.
But
it is not so with the living soul; he is at times panting after the
smiles of God; he is thirsting after His manifested presence; he
feels dissatisfied with the world, and all that it presents, if he
cannot find the Lord, and does not enjoy the light of His
countenance. Where this is experienced, it stamps a man as having the
grace of God in his heart.
-Gospel
report by preacher J.C. Philpot (1802-1869 A.D.)
June
3rd, EARS FROM HARVESTED SHEAVES
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