| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 19 |
Page 4 |
Patience is only the first link in a golden chain. It begins in tribulation — in the fire. That is where the gold is refined. I saw the men in the great smelter at Denver, bringing in the ore — rough, unsightly, without any appearance of value, and I followed the processes until they showed us the pure metals ready for use. That is the way this chain of gold begins. The rough ore of common life is taken and put into the hot furnace, where it is purified until it shines in lustrous beauty. “Patience, experience.” Experience is what we have learned for ourselves by living. Most of us do not learn much any other way. Every day’s life leaves its new lines written upon our character.
“Our deed still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.”
After experience comes hope. The more we know of the truth and the beauty of the blessedness of hope, the more does the future mean to us. Trying Christ makes us even the more sure of Him. Testing the promises makes us feel more secure in resting upon them. This “hope,” too, is one that never shall disappoint us. One of the most pathetic things I saw in all the great West was a little graveyard near the foot of Pike’s Peak, in which sleep many of the men who journeyed there with the wild expectation of finding gold. Their hope put them to shame and they died broken-hearted. Not so does ever the Christian’s hope.
The ground of all our hope is in Christ, who dies for us while we were yet sinners. God does not begin to love us when we begin to get good and love Him. He loves us first in our sins, and it is His love that starts in our hearts the first glimmering of love for Him. The argument here is very strong. If He loved us in our sins so much that He died for us, surely now, when we have been justified and saved, He will be faithful to us and will keep us from falling away. Thus the cross is the abiding proof of the unchanging love of God. “If, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”
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