'Practical atheists', we daily -'
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'Practical atheists', we daily prove ourselves to be.
We profess to believe in an All-mighty, All-present,
All-seeing God. But we would be highly offended
if a person said to us, "You do not really believe
that God sees everything—that He is everywhere
present—that He is an Almighty Jehovah." We
would almost think that he was taking us for
an atheist! And yet 'practical atheists', we
daily prove ourselves to be.
For instance, we profess to believe that God sees
everything. And yet we are plotting and planning
as though He saw nothing.
We profess to know that God can do everything.
And yet we are always cutting out schemes, and
carving out contrivances, as though He were like
the gods of the heathen, looking on and taking
no notice.
We profess to believe that God is everywhere
present to relieve every difficulty and bring His
people out of every trial. And yet when we get
into the difficulty and into the trial—we speak,
think, and act, as though there were no such
omnipresent God, who knows the circumstances
of our case, and can stretch forth His hand to
bring us out of it.
Thus the Lord is obliged to thrust us into trials
and afflictions, because we are such blind fools,
that we cannot learn what a God we have to deal
with—until we come experimentally into those spots
of difficulty and trial, out of which none but such a
God can deliver us.
This, then, is one reason why the Lord often plunges
His people so deeply into a sense of sin. It is to show
them what a wonderful salvation from the guilt, filth,
and power of sin, there is in the Lord Jesus Christ.
For the same reason, too, they walk in such scenes
of temptation. It is in order to show them what a
wonder-working God He is, in bringing them out.
This too is the reason why many of them are so
harassed and plagued. It is that they may not
live and act as though there were . . .
no God to go to,
no Almighty friend to consult,
no kind Jesus to rest their weary heads upon.
It is in order to teach them experimentally and
inwardly those lessons of grace and truth which
they never would know until the Lord, as it were,
thus compels them to learn—and actually forces
them to believe what they profess to believe.
Such pains is he obliged to take with us—such poor
scholars, such dull creatures we are. No child at
a school ever gave his master a thousandth part of
the trouble that we have given the Lord to teach us.
In order, then, to teach us what a merciful and
compassionate God He is—in order to open up the
heights, and depths, and lengths, and breadths of
His love—He is compelled to treat, at times, His
people very roughly—and handle them very sharply.
He is obliged to make very great use of His rod,
because He sees that "foolishness is so bound up
in the hearts" of His children—that nothing but the
repeated "rod of correction will ever drive it far
from them."
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