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Bev. A. B. Winchester 39
A Restful Illustration
I was down at Atlantic City at a conference last Summer, and I
noticed there when I would go down for a bath, the children were
on the sand,—the great wide smooth sands, with their little shovels
and their little pails, and they were digging and building forts, I am
sorry to say it, the very children were playing war most of the time,
and they made the smooth sand full of ugly holes as war has pitted
the fields of beautiful France and Belgium. Then the old sea turned
without crying or fretting, it just rolled in and rolled in, and the
children went back and back, and the sea covered over all the forts
and mock trenches and smoothed them all out and leveled the sand
and made it as smooth as this desk. Then when it had completed the
work it went away back again. And back the children came and built
new forts, and on the sea rolls again and smoothes it the same as be-
fore. Now the sea never was tired, it never was weary. It was the
expression of Him who stays calm through all the perturbations of
stormy and evil days. The children of men have taken this creation
of His and have dug it up into all sorts of things. But, oh, the great
Lord is waiting to roll into it! He is waiting to roll into Russia,
where for hundreds of years millions of our poor fellow beings have
not had a chance to express themselves in any legitimate freedom.
They have not had a chance to look into the face of the Lord Jesus
Christ, the Saviour of the world. Of course they have heard of Him
in the midst of ritual and ceremony, but I say they have not had
a chance to look into His face, they have not had a chance to hear of
what He has done for them in pure grace and love.
Now what does it mean that God is calling us to realize that He
wants clean vessels to carry His blessed glad tidings,—the glad tidings
of the happy God, to realize that He wants us, to recognize that it is
not for us to say, "Now I think I will do this, and I think I will give a
little to this and a little to that"; but to ask, "Lord, this is thine and
I am thine, what wilt Thou have me to do?" I trust all of us are
looking and longing for that supreme hour when our blessed Lord
shall come and call His Church to Himself. Some of us are looking
for that day by day, with joy and longing; but I trust that even that
is not to obstruct the present duty. The fact is that in order to realize
that, this must be done. "If I will that he tarry, till I come, what is
that to thee? Follow thou me." Go on, and do this work. Russia is
not the only part of the world. We are centralizing, specializing, if)
we may so speak, on Russia at this present time, because never such
an opening ivas made for the hosts of the Lord as there is there today
Certainly we are to "go into all the world," India, Africa, and the
islands of the sea; we must have them all. But today let us think
of Russia, let us think of God’s great power and His willingness to I
^^ / 1/
nk I
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