Christ a Shield
IS a Shield and Deliverer Christ is ever with His people. Our estimation of this truth will be proportioned to our intelligent apprehension of the number and potency of our enemies — the costliness and preciousness of the treasure thus divinely protected. With what unslumbering vigilance, with what divine power, with what changeless love does the Lord Jesus shield the work of grace in the soul of His people! Who keeps that spark alive in the ocean? Who guards this vineyard of red wine night and day lest any hurt it? Who preserves faith from faltering, love
from chilling, hope from dying? Who strengthens the work when it is feeble, raises it when it droops, restores it when it relapses, keeps it in the cold of winter and the drought of summer, and, when the frosts and winds of autumn would nip and scatter its foliage, clothes il with the freshness and bloom of spring? Oh, it is Jesus, encircling with His all-protecting shield the work which His death accomplished and which His Spirit wrought. Trembling believer in Christ! cast not away this holy confidence, for it hath great recompence of reward. The work of grace in your heart shall never die; the kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in your soul is indestructible. ‘They shall never jperisJi’* is the declaration of the Shepherd who bought you with His blood. Watched over by Christ, you are kept by the power of God. And, although the tide of spiritual affection may ebb, and the shadows of twilight fall thickly upon your soul, and you be ready to regard your conversion a mistake, your religion a delusion, and your hope a fallacy — thus casting away your confidence, yet, there is One who knows His own work, recognizes His own image, reads His Spirit’s writing in the soul, and must Himself cease to be ere He allows those living embers of love He has enkindled upon the altar of your renewed heart to die. The rain may descend, the winds may blow, the flood may surge —
‘* But the inextinguishable flame burns on, And shall for ever bum.”
And then there are external assualts from which alone Christ can shield us. Innumerable and invisible, sleepless and restless, working with a power almost almighty, and every where with an ubiquity almost omnipresent, ever plotting our ruin, are the spiritual enemies of our soul, and the sworn foes of our faith. The world, and its fascinations; Satan, and his devices; the flesh, and its tendencies; error, and its disguises, are all confederate against the child of God, opposing his every advance in holiness. But Christ is our ever-present shield, near at the moment of assault, and skillful to parry and disarm it. ‘’Fear not Abram I am thy shield’^ are words addressed to all who have like precious faith with him. Listen to Paul when defending Christianity before Nero: ‘’At my first answer no man stood vnth me hut all menfo7’sooh me... Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me and strengthened m.” Severed from the protection and sympathy of man, he was all the more conscious of the presence and love of God. This is the manner of the Lord with us. The stage shall be swept of the human to give place to the Divine. When the last human prop bends, and the last spark of creature-hope expires, hail it as the harbinger of Christ’s nearness, that the more signal may appear His loving deliverance, and the more complete and undivided His glory. Oh yes! the Lord encompasses you. Encircled by danger, you are also encircled by Christ. When you embark in His cause on foreign service, enter the carriage of a railway, launch upon the treacherous sea, bend your steps of mercy to the bedside of infection, travel the lone and dreary road, be your experience what it may, let your mind be kept in perfect peace, trusting in this truth: the ever-present protection of Jesus. The unhealthy clime shall be harmless, the sickening malaria innocuous, the perilous transit safe, curtained within the pavilion of your Saviour’s love. Swelling above the tempest, louder than the voice of many waters, or whispered in the still 5^ solitude, softer than the JEolian’s breathing, shall be heard the words of Jesus, ‘’Fear not I am with thee; he not dismayed I am thy Ood’^ Lord, it is enough! My heart trusted in Thee, and I am helped!
Christ is with His people as the Head and Depository of all their spiritual sitpplies. The resources of the believer, although not from himself, and often, like Hagar’s well, veiled from the eye, are yet, like that well-spring of water, flowing at the very side of the needy saint. Destitution may reign far and wide, and the plaintive cry ascend from many a famished lip, “Who will show us any good?” — yet his soul, fed with the hidden manna and quenched from the river, the streams of which make glad the city of God, is kept alive in famine and in drought, and is like ‘’a watered garden and lihe a spring of water lohose waters fail notP And what explains this mystery? The nearness
I at his side of a full Christ, overflowing with a redundancy of grace, love, and sjmipathy, suiting every circumstance, answering every call, supplying every demand. New exigencies may occur in his daily history, new demands made upon his mental and physical powers, trials of a new form may transpire, infirmities but just discovered, sorrows hitherto untasted, temptations before unknown, all marking a new epoch in his history, a new phase of Christian experience, and all clamorous for the grace that is to sustain, the sympathy that is to soothe, the wisdom that is to guide. And shall they ask in vain? Never! Christ is with us, furnished, given, and pledged to supply amply and fully all the necessities of His people. ‘’And of His fulness have all we received and grace for grace’^ that is, grace following grace, grace answering every call for grace, more grace, grace outmeasuring
Ob CHEIST EVER WITH YOU.
all past supply, all present want, ‘’ exceeding ahundantly above all that we can ask or think,^’^ O blessed truth! in the world’s insolvency, the believer has a safe bank; in the world’s famine, he has a full granary; in the world’s drought, he has springs of water; in the world’s heat, he has his pleasant and grateful shade. And all this is concentrated in Christ; for Christ is all. O favored saint! to have a full, overflowing, redundant supply, so near; exiled from all other resources, other supports failing, other springs drying, other shades vanishing as in a night, and he, perchance, sitting him down to die in hopeless grief, lo! words fall upon his ear softer, sweeter than angels’ chimes, ^’I am with you alway j with you in this lone place and at this trying moment, to unseal your eye to the boundless fulness that it pleased the Father should dwell in Me for you, the Father’s child.”
ILLUSTRATIONS.
“Hold thou me up and I shall be safe.” In a certain regiment fifty-seven men were men of prayer. Before a great battle they all fell on their knees and asked Christ to take care of them. All survived while hundreds of the regiment were killed.
WHAT SET HIM TO THINKING.
“Glad to see you. I shall never forget the medicine you gave me below Frederick.”
This was said by my ambulance driver, a young man who had been directed by the surgeon to go with me on a tour of distribution. I did not recollect him for the moment. He seemed happy as we started off, and inclined to converse. “I didn’t think much of religion,” said he, “before I came to this war, but I’ve had a great many serious thoughts here. I mean to lead a different life.”
“What set you a thinking?”
“Ball’s Bluff was one place.”
“Were you there?”
“Yes, all day fighting. I tell you it was solemn work; my comrades falling dead on either side of me. I felt that I wanted religion.”
“That set you a thinking?”
“Yes, it did; and another thing was al
young man by the name of W, a brave
fellow and a Christian, when on the morning of the battle he knelt down in front of our tent and prayed.’’
“Tell me about that,” said I.
“We had been detailed from our regiment as orderlies of General Lander, and occupied a tent together. We were not obliged to go to the battle, but hearing that our company were going, we could not stay away, and both obtained permission to fall in. Off we
hurried. W ran back for his cartridge
box, and then, as if he had forgotten something else, dropped upon his knees at the door of the tent, and began to praj most earnestly. I never heard such a prayer as that. I took my hat off, but did not kneel. The captain of his company ( not a Christian) stood by and shook his head at the boys to have them keep still, saying, in a low tone, as he pointed to the one praying, ‘That ’s a good boy; ’ and General Lander, when he heard of that prayer, remarked: ‘That is the hind of soldiers I want. That hoy is worth his weight in Gold,^ We went to the fight, and neither of us was hurt. God helped us through.”
MUSIC AND LIGHT ON THE BATTLE FIELD.
A brave and godly captain in one of our western regiments told one of us his story, as we were removing him to the hospital. He was shot through both thighs with a rifle bullet: a wound from which he could not recover. While lying on the field, he suffered intense agony from thirst. He supported his head upon his hand, and the rain from heaven was falling around him. In a little while a little pool of water formed under his elbow, and he thought if he could only get to that puddle he might quench his thirst. He tried to get into a position to suck up a mouthful of muddy water, but he was unable to reach within a foot of it. Said he, “I never felt so much the loss of any earthly blessing. By-and-by night fell, and the stars shone out clear and beautiful above the dark field; and I began to think of the great God who had given his Son to die a death of agony for me, and that He was up there — up above the scene of suffering, and above those glorious stars; and I felt that I was going home to meet Him, and praise Him there; and I felt that I ought to praise God, even wounded and on the battle field. I could not help singing that beautiful hymn,
*When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies,
I’ll bid farewell to every fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.’
And,” said he, “there was a Christian brother in the brush near me. I could not see him, but I could hear him. He took up the strain; and beyond him another and another caught it up all over the terrible battle field of Shiloh. That night the echo was resounding, and we made the field of battle ring with hymns of praise to God!”