| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 5 |
Page 2 |
What, then, is the divine life-plan? What are we to do with our cares? Everything that threatens to give us anxiety is to be taken at once to God. Nothing is too great to carry to Him. Does not He bear up all worlds? Does not He rule over all the affairs of the universe? Is there any matter in our life, how great soever it may seem to us, too hard for Him to manage? Is any perplexity too sore for Him to resolve? Is any human despair too dark for Him to illumine with hope? Is there any tangle or confusion out of which He cannot extricate us? Or is anything too small to bring to Him? Is He not our Father, and is He not interested in whatever concerns us? There is not one of the countless things that fly like specks of dust all through our daily life, tending to vex and fret us that we may not take to God. And this is the cure, which the Scriptures prescribe for care. The divine philosophy of living says: “Be anxious for nothing, but make everything known to God; in everything, by prayer and thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” Refer every disturbing thing to Him, that He may bear the burden of it.
“But why should I have to make it known to Him?” asks some one. “He knows all about it already. Why must I take it to Him?” It is reason enough that He has asked us to do it; and if we will not make it known to Him, can we complain if He does not help us? He wants us to learn to confide in Him and to flee to Him in every moment of perplexity or pressure. Whenever there comes into our experience a difficulty, an annoyance – anything that tends to produce irritation or anxiety or alarm or confusion – we are to carry it at once to God. We are to get it somehow out of our unskilled hands and off our frail shoulder into the hands and over upon the shoulder of Christ.
It is not enough to kneel down and make a prayer, nor is it enough to pray about the particular matter that worries us, asking for help or deliverance. Only the most simple-hearted definiteness in prayer will meet the need. We must bring the very perplexity itself and put it out of our hands into God’s, that He may work it out for us. We are to bring the matter as literally to Him as we would carry a broken watch to the watchmaker’s, leaving it for him to repair and readjust. A little child playing with a handful of cords, when they begin to get into a tangle, goes at once to her mother, that her patient fingers may unravel the snarl. How much better this than to pull and tug at the cords till the tangle becomes inextricable! May not many of us learn a lesson from the little child? Would it not be better for us, whenever we find the slightest entanglement in any of our affairs, or the arising of any perplexity, to take it at once to God, that His skilful hands may set it right?
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