| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 30 |
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A young lady can read well. If she would carry out the spirit of her consecration to Christ, she is to employ her acquisition in giving happiness and profit to others. She can brighten many an evening hour in her own home by reading aloud to the loved ones that cluster around the hearth stone. Or she can do still more Christly work by seeking out the aged with dim eyes, the poor who cannot read, or the sick in their lonely chambers, and quietly and tenderly reading to them words of comfort, instruction and divine love.
Take the blessings of spiritual experience. There is a wonderful sentence in one of Paul’s letters. He is thanking God for the comfort which he had given to him in some sorrow, and he says, “Blessed be the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” – that is, he praised God not merely because he had himself been comforted, but because the comfort which had been given to him in his sorrow gave him added power wherewith to comfort others.
It was a great thing to feel the warmth of God’s love breaking into his heart, the light of his face streaming upon his soul, and his blessed peace stealing into his bosom. But his personal experience of joy in being thus comforted was entirely buried away in the gladness of the other thought, “Ah! Now I can be a better preacher to the troubled. I can bring more consolation to the sorrowing. I have gotten a new power of helpfulness with which to serve my fellows. I can do more hereafter to wipe away tears and to put songs into the hearts of others.” It was for this that he thanked God – not that the comfort of God had been imparted to him, although that was a great joy, but that he had something now which he never had before with which to do good and scatter benedictions. His greatest gladness was not that God had lighted a new lamp in his soul to pour its heavenly beams upon his own sorrow, although that was cause for deep praise, but that he had now a new lamp to carry into other darkened homes. What a sublimity of usefulness! Yet that is the true Christian way of receiving comfort and every spiritual gift and blessing. That is the true idea of consecration.
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