Gleanings Among the Sheaves

The promises of God are to the believer an inexhaustible mine of wealth. Happy is it for him if he knows how to search out their secret veins, and enrich himself with their hid treasures. They are an armory, containing all manner of offensive and defensive weapons. Blessed is he who has learned to enter into the sacred arsenal, to put on the breastplate and the helmet, and to lay his hand to the spear and to the sword. They are a surgery, in which the believer will find all manner of restoratives and blessed elixirs; nor lacks there an ointment for every wound, a cordial for every faintness, a remedy for every disease. Blessed is he who is well skilled in heavenly pharmacy, and knoweth how to lay hold on the healing virtues of the promises of God. The promises are to the Christian a storehouse of food. They are as the granaries which Joseph built in Egypt, or as the golden pot wherein the manna was preserved. Blessed is he who can take the five barley loaves and fishes of promise, and break them till his five thousand necessities shall all be supplied, and he is able to gather up baskets full of fragments. The promises are the Christian’s Magna Charta of liberty; they are the title deeds of his heavenly estate. Happy is he who knoweth how to read them well, and call them all his own. Yea, they are the jewel room in which the Christian’s crown treasures are preserved. The regalia are his, secretly to admire to-day, which he shall openly wear in Paradise hereafter. He is already privileged as a king with the silver key that unlocks the strong room; he may even now grasp the sceptre, wear the crown, and put upon his shoulders the imperial mantle. O, how unutterably rich are the promises of our faithful, covenant-keeping God! If we had the tongue of the mightiest of orators, and if that tongue could be touched with a live coal from off the altar, yet still it could not utter a tenth of the praises of the exceeding great and precious promises of God. Nay, they who have entered into rest, whose tongues are attuned to the lofty and rapturous eloquence of cherubim and seraphim, even they can never tell the height and depth, the length and breadth of the unsearchable riches of Christ, which are stored up in the treasure-house of God — the promises of the covenant of His grace.

It is a tough battle which the Christian is called to fight; not one which carpet knights might win; no easy skirmish which he might gain, who dashed to battle on some sunshiny day, looked at the host, then turned his courser’s rein, and daintily dismounted at the door of his silken tent. It is not a campaign which he shall win, who, but a raw recruit to-day, foolishly imagines that one week of service will insure a crown of glory. It is a life-long war; a contest which will require all our strength, if we are to be triumphant; a battle at which the stoutest heart might quail; a fight from which the bravest would shrink, did he not remember that the Lord is on his side; therefore whom shall he fear? God is the strength of his life: of whom shall he be afraid? This fight is not one of main force, or physical might; if it were, we might the sooner win it; but it is all the more dangerous from the fact that it is a strife of mind, a contest of heart, a struggle of the spirit — ofttimes an agony of the soul.

Do you wonder that the Christian is called to conflict? God never gives strong faith without fiery trial; he will not build a strong ship, without subjecting it to very mighty storms; he will not make you a mighty warrior, if he does not intend to try your skill in battle. The sword of the Lord must be used; the blades of heaven must be smitten against the armor of the evil one, and yet they shall not break, for they are of true Jerusalem metal, which shall never snap. We shall conquer, if we begin the battle in the right way. If we have sharpened our swords on the cross, we have nothing whatever to fear; for though we may be sometimes cast down and discomforted, we shall assuredly at last put to flight all our adversaries, for we are the sons of God even now. Why, then, should we fear? Who shall bid us “stay,” if God bid us advance?

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