Gold Nugget 244 - A Gangrene in Society

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      The heaviest guilt lies with the tempter.  When a man has deluded and ruined a woman, society regards the woman with loathing and contempt, while the man often escapes with comparative impunity.  This is one of the grossest instances of injustice that the future judgment will surely rectify.  But in any case of profligacy great selfishness and cruelty are shown.  The miserable creatures … could not continue their wretched traffic if men did not encourage it.  The demand creates the supply, and is responsible for the hopeless misery that results. …

      It is a gangrene in society, eating out its very heart.  Nothing more surely undermines the true welfare of a people.  It is fatal to the sanctities of the home – sanctities on which the very life of the nation depends. 

The Pulpit Commentary, Proverbs p. 158, Proverbs 7:6-27, (W. F. Adeney)

Gold Nugget 244

A Gangrene in Society

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Gold Nugget 243 - Parental Training

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      Parental Training. ...

      In early days this rests chiefly with the mother, and throughout life her moral influence is likely to be the more persuasive.  Here is woman’s great work.  Man fills the world with the noise of his busy doings.  But woman has a no less great and useful task in moulding the characters of the toilers of the future.  Yet the father has his duty in parental training; and there are often special circumstances in which his knowledge of the world or his firmness of control is essential.

      Let parents feel that nothing can take the place of home training.  The Sunday school cannot do the work of the mother’s counsel.  No pressure of public duty should let a man excuse himself for neglecting the religious training of his children.  He deludes himself if he thinks he can do it by proxy, be the substitute ever so efficient a teacher.  Nothing can take the place of the anxious watchfulness of parental love. …

      The child has his duty in regard to it as well as the parent.  His will is free.  The best seed may be wasted on bad soil.  It is his duty to treasure up wholesome home lessons as the most valuable portion divided to him.  How mad the desire of some to escape from the control of the home to the fascinating liberty of the world, of the perils and deceits of which they are so ignorant?  Why should the young man be so anxious to take a journey into a far country out of the sight of those who have his interest most at heart? 

      Perhaps there have been unwise restraints in the home.  But escape from them is no excuse for rushing to the utmost bounds of license.

      Sound parental training, well received and followed, is a great boon for the whole of life.  It is a source of quiet restfulness. … After the feverish tumult of the day, to retire to rest with hallowed memories loving recalled, what a help it is to peace of heart! … These old memories rise up to cheer in dismal tasks or to warn from deceitful temptations.  And if they have become doubly sacred because the voice that spake the words of counsel is hushed in death, shall they not also be more reverently cherished?

      Who knows but what those patient, gentle eyes that followed the child in his nursery griefs and joys may be looking down from the heights of heaven to watch him still as he bends to the hard toil of life?   

The Pulpit Commentary, Proverbs p. 142-143, Proverbs 6:20-22, (W. F. Adeney)

Gold Nugget 243

Parental Training

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Gold Nugget 242 - Then They Shall Know

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       Some men will listen to no warning voice except the warning voice of death.  They learn at last what, had they learnt before, would have been their salvation.  But now to them the lesson is useless; it serves only to admonish others.

      Crowds of men are practical infidels all through life, although they profess to believe in a reigning God; but death scatters the clouds of unbelief, and is a startling revelation of the invisible world. 

      Amid the excitements and the turmoil of life they would not reflect, nor ponder, nor decide.  They preferred to remain in the haze of doubt.  At no point would they brace up their moral energy to say, “I know.”  Yet there comes an hour when faith, and righteousness, and God, and judgment will be real.  Then shall they know.”

The Pulpit Commentary, Ezekiel II p. 200, Ezekiel 33:21-29, (J. D. Davies)

Gold Nugget 242

Then They Shall Know

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Gold Nugget 241 - Children of Thsoe We Follow

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      A man may inherit the throne of a great king, but if he has a mean and servile disposition, and inherits no kingly nature, he is not a true son of his father.  Titles and estates may pass from men of high powers to imbeciles.  The good name of a worthy Christian man may be borne by a worthless descendant.  We can not entail character.  No man can be certain that his children will follow his example, however good and attractive that may be, and when it is not followed the true man is not represented by his children. …

      We are all more or less influenced by our surroundings, and it is therefore of great importance that we should not choose hurtful companions.  But there is a way of resisting a bad example when we cannot escape from its physical proximity.  To yield to it is a sign of weakness and sin.  The result is to make us spiritually the children of those we follow. 

The Pulpit Commentary, Ezekiel p. 278, Ezekiel 16:3, (W. F. Adeney)

Gold Nugget 241 

Children of Those We Follow

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Gold Nugget 240 - Damning the River of Grace

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      The more the advantages, the weightier the account demanded; the longer the time granted for amendment, the severer the castigation for wasted opportunities.  Men “treasure up” wrath for themselves.  Character indurates, like the writing on clay tablets hardened in the sun.  No possible excuse can be found where the day of grace has passed unused.  A dreadful contrast, to accumulate a store of wrath instead of profiting by the riches of God’s goodness.

      The money of heaven was placed at men’s disposal; but, throwing this away as rubbish, they made their own counterfeit coins, and are punished for their treason against the King’s government.  Trifle not with sin when thou seest its present disastrous results, but calculate thence the “wrath of the Lamb,” when gentleness has been spurned and maltreated, and goodness must give place to severity.  The smoothly gliding river of God’s long-suffering, if barred out of thy heart by closed gates, will swell to a might torrent, sweeping thy frail obstructions to ruin. …

      No description of hell can transcend the awful picture of “wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish,” resting upon the soul; that, clasping unrighteousness to its bosom as a prize on earth, finds it sting like a serpent and burn with fiercest remorse when allowed full sway in its “own place.” …

      A righteous aim can be permanently attained only in righteous ways.  The recognition of this stamps the government of the universe as moral. … It includes passive endurance and active perseverance; the stationary posture of the caryatides, and the carrying of a burden in the face of wind and storm.  The other class are described as “factious,” quarrelling with their lot, coveting pleasure and notoriety … Refusing to bow to the yoke of truth, they become the slaves of unrighteousness; and a hard master and terrible paymaster does unrighteousness prove.

      The judgment of God will proceed on easily intelligible principles.  It is not difficult for men to decide whether they are working good or working evil.  It is not reaching a conclusion after abstract speculation, nor holding a creed with multitudinous details.  Only an omniscient Judge, however, could bring to light the hidden deeds of darkness, the secret thing, good or bad.

The Pulpit Commentary, Romans p. 72-73, Romans 2:6-11, (S. R. Aldridge)

Gold Nugget 240

Damning the River of Grace

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Gold Nugget 239 - True Religion

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      Most men want to have a religion of some sort.  If they do not want to have it while they live, yet, recognizing the importance of eternity and the judgment, they want to have it before they die.  Hence men who never think of religion in their hours of health and activity, will send for the minister when they are on a bed of sickness. 

      Hence you have such cases as that of the great Emperor Charles V. of Germany, who had been a man of war and restless ambition almost all his days, retiring into a convent for the closing years of his life, and seeking within its cloistered walls that preparation for eternity which he had so long put off.  But we want a religion not merely to die with, but to live by.  After all, it is but a poor religion which a man puts on as if it were to be his shroud.  What then is true religion?  Where is it to be found? …

      It has always been an injury to true religion when it has been influenced too much by the opinions of men.  It was so in the history of the Jewish religion, when the kings of Israel corrupted it by their desire of imitating heathen nations.  It was so in the early Christian Church.  The more the Church came under the control of the state, under the control of human authorities, the more worldly it became, the further it departed from the simplicity and spirituality of apostolic times. 

      Thank God for the clear-headed, Christian-hearted men, who in all ages have resisted the intrusion of human authority and human opinion in matters of religion. …It is a great principle, worth dying for, worth living for too, that religion is not to be regulated by the opinions of men.  Human influence, human authority, human rank, are of little account in this matter.  This is true as regards the Church of Christ, and it is true also as regards the individual. …

      Religion, therefore, is a personal matter.  The outward form is useless without the internal reality.  We want inward Christians – Christians in heart, Christians in spirit.  All other Christians are useless, and worse than useless.  They are deceiving others, and perhaps they are deceiving themselves.  We want Christians whose everyday life is a song of praise … and who commune with God in silent but earnest prayer.

      As I stepped one day into the office of a leading man of business in New York, I noticed over his desk a portrait of a citizen who, as he afterwards told me, had been a dear friend of his own.  Beneath the portrait were words so beautiful that I got the owner’s permission to copy them:  “Whose face was a thanksgiving for his past life, and a love-letter to all mankind.”

      It is Christians like that we want, who carry in their heart and on their face love and gratitude to God, and also love to men.  Christians like that would soon transform the Church.  Christians like that would soon transform the world.

The Pulpit Commentary, Romans p. 66-68, Romans 2:17-29, (C. H. Irwin)

Gold Nugget 239

True Religion

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Gold Nugget 238 - The Testimony

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      The kernel of the gospel is the truth that Jesus was the Christ.  He was the Person spoken of by all the prophets as to come.  Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, born in the reign of Augustus Caesar, and crucified in that of Tiberius; known to his contemporaries in Judaea and Galilee as a Teacher and a Prophet; known to later ages by the Gospels which record his life and death and resurrection from the dead; is God’s Christ.

      He came into the world, in accordance with the eternal purpose of God, to be the Teacher, the Saviour, the Judge, the Lord, the King of the whole earth, the Head of the human race.  He fulfilled in his own person all the predictions of the prophets; he accomplished by his work all that God had in store for the redemption of the sons of men.  Whatever the Holy Ghost spoke of the Godhead, of the priesthood, of the sacrifice, of the reign, of the glorious kingdom of Messiah, has its fulfillment in the Lord Jesus.

      The truth, therefore, that Jesus was the Christ is the kernel of the whole gospel.  But further, this is either a fact or it is not a fact.  There is no cloudland of uncertain existence, no matter of doubtful disputation or of fluctuating opinion.  Those who have told us these things are witnesses of what they knew, not disputers about what they thought.  What they have delivered to us is their testimony.  We must either accept it as true or reject it as false.

      It has met with both treatments in the world, and, whether believed or disbelieved, has been a potent factor in men’s behaviors.  When believed, it has made the kind of man that Paul was, the kind of men and women that Aquila and Pricilla were.  It has made men pure, holy, upright, patient, meek, kind, unselfish, self-denying, labouring for the good of others rather than for their own gain; with affections set on heavenly more than on earthly things; conscientious, true, faithful to their word; to be trusted and relied upon; great benefactors to their race, full of love to mankind.

      When disbelieved, it has not simply been set aside as a thing unworthy of credit, but it has set in action the most malignant passions in the human breast.  Envy and jealousy, hatred and malice, have blazed up in all their fury against the authors and abettors of this testimony.  You would think, judging by the fierce rage of the opponents, that there could not be a greater crime against humanity than to teach men to love God, to abstain from all evil, and to live in peace and good will towards one another.  Judging by the rage of the opponents, you would think that a greater wrong could not be done to men than to tell them of life and rest and happiness in the eternal reach beyond the grave, as encouragements to patient well-doing on this side the grave.

      Jews and heathens, so unlike one another in everything else, were exactly alike in their reception of this testimony.  The Jews blasphemed and cursed and persecuted, and brought for punishment before Roman tribunals those who gave testimony for Christ; the heathen, tolerant of every form of idolatry, let loose fire and sword and wild beast against the harmless disciples of the Lord Jesus.  The accomplished philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, gave Justin Martyr to the executioner and Polycarp to the flames, with as little scruple as Nero tortured his Christian subjects at Rome.  The scornful hatred of Tacitus for the pestilential superstition of the Christian was as bitter as the scurrilous wit of Lucian.

      In our own day many tongues are let loose against the testimony.  New philosophers, new exponents of the physical laws by which the world consists, new pretenders to superior wisdom and wider intelligence in the various departments of human knowledge, however differing among themselves in the fundamental principles of their several schemes, agree in the scornful rejection of “the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

      The Church meanwhile pursues her unwavering course.  She holds in her hand the lamp of that truth which she did not invent, but which she received from God.  That lamp sheds forth its heavenly light, whether men receive it or whether they shut it out from theirs hearts and walk on in darkness.  For that truth the Church is ready now, as she ever was, to endure the scorn and hatred of mankind or to suffer imprisonment and death.   Her office is to testify that Jesus is the Christ.  By the grace of God she will continue that testimony until the Lord comes, and her witness to the absent is swallowed up in her adoration of the present, in visibily power and glory. 

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Acts II p.95-96, Acts 18:4-17, (A. C. Hervey)

 

Gold Nugget 238

The Testimony

 

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Gold Nugget 237 - Commendable Scepticism

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      The nobility of the inquiring Sprit

      The attitudes of men towards truth, as freshly revealed, or as revealed in fresh forms are threefold:  some are willfully antagonistic; some are weakly receptive; some are intelligently skeptical.  The word “skepticism” may be used in a good as well as in a bad sense.  It properly stands for that disposition to question and doubt which is one of the features of the thoughtful and inquiring mind.

      Scepticism as dependent on natural disposition.  There are, in respect of this spirit, marked diversities in nations and in races.  And there are answering differences in families and in individuals. … The beginnings of what will afterwards appear as skepticism are found in children.  Some will question the why and wherefore of everything that is told them, while others will open wide eyes, and take in as real, the strangest fairy tales that can be told them. … Where the skeptical spirit is unduly developed the corrective spirit of faith must be nourished; and where credulity is excessive, the mind must be quickened to doubt. …

      Scepticism as fostered by intellectual pride.  This is one of the gravest difficulties of our age, in which remarkable advances in knowledge have been made.  Those advances have chiefly borne relation to the sphere of the physical sciences, and in that sphere pride is readily nourished, because, apparently, all depends on men’s own observation and research.  It becomes easy for men to say – What we observe and know is the truth; and there is no other truth than “truth of fact.”

      So we find all around us much skepticism in relation to the moral, spiritual, revelational spheres:  a disposition to unreasonable doubt; to doubting for doubting’s sake.  This needs to be wisely but firmly rebuked, and its real source, in mere pride of intellect, should be pointed out.  They physical is not the only sphere through which God has revealed himself to his creatures; and it never can be a sign of human wisdom that the best three parts of God’s revelation are set aside as the dreams of dreamers.

      Scepticism as a result of associations.  As a disposition of mind, skepticism takes a place among infectious mental diseases, communicated very readily by association.  A skeptical workman will infect his fellows.  A skeptical student will change the tone of his college.  A skeptical member of a family will destroy the recipiency of a whole family.  So we, who have any kind of trust of others, need to be watchful over the influence of such persons. …

      Scepticism as an impulse to inquiry.  This is its good side … It is the spirit that seeks for two things:  comprehension, or the distinct, clear, and intelligent understanding of any teachings; and verification, or adequate and reasonable grounds for belief.  But it is characteristic of intelligent inquiry that it seeks its proofs within the spheres of its subjects.  If it inquires concerning physical principles, it seeks for proof and illustration in physical facts.  If its sphere be moral or spiritual, it asks for moral or spiritual reason and proof. …

      The noble man, the intelligent believer, must have won faith out of skepticism – in the sense of humble and earnest inquiry.  Those who are simply receptive have their mission in the world, and we desire to institute no unworthy, no discouraging comparisons; but for the active forms of Christian work, and for the emergencies of the Christian conflict, those are needed who have won faith out of fight.

      The Beroeans are commended because they doubted and inquired; and yet this is the very thing which many nowadays would have feared.

The Pulpit Commentary, Acts II. P. 83-84, Acts 17:11, (R. Tuck)

Gold Nugget 237

Commendable Scepticism

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Gold Nugget 236 - The Power of Habit

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      It is singular that our most common association with the word “habit” should be bad habits, and that a much stronger form of teaching should go in the direction of warning against or curing bad habits, than in that of culturing and nourishing good ones.  Moralist have given abundant counsel in respect of common habits of personal and social life, but religious teachers, even of the young, have not worthily recognized that habits may be formed in connection with the religious life, and that direct instruction and guidance in relation to them is imperatively needed. …

      The philosophical and the practical explanations of the formation of habits may be given; and it may be well to show how the very muscles, nerves, and senses get fixed by continuing to act in the same direction.  But the point to dwell on is that habits may be settled by intelligent intention and effort.  They may be a product of will, and the formation of good habits is a proper exercise of the regenerate will. …

      In all questions of moral culture or religious duty the natural dispositions of men have to be taken into account.  To some habits come easily, and they can be as easily changed.  Others only form habits after much self-mastery and conflict.  But these are the persons who are best helped by habits when once they get them fixed. …

      A man is not always disposed for private prayer or public worship, but the habit keeps him related to these things, and it is often found that, while engaged in them, the needed mood of feeling will come.  Custom only may take us to worship, but eye and heart may be opened when we are there.

      Hindrances of family or business life seriously affect the man who has no religious habits.  They fail to hurt the man who has his life well ordered, and his regular times and ways.  The habits soon get recognized, and the incidents of life take shape so as to fit in with them. 

The Pulpit Commentary, Acts II. p. 81-82, Acts 17:2, (R. Tuck)

Gold Nugget 236

The Power of Habit

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Gold Nugget 235 - Between These Extremes

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      Paul stands in Athens, amidst the master-pieces of Greek art and the memorials of Greek wisdom.  It is not admiration or aesthetic delight which is awakened in him, but moral indignation.

      Christianity is not opposed to art; but Christianity does not approve the worship of sensuous or ideal beauty apart from moral earnestness.  In the true relation, religion absorbs art into itself; when art is substituted for religion, there is moral decay.  Nor is Christianity hostile to philosophy.  On the contrary, there was in Greek philosophy a preparation for Christ.  There were germs of truth in the Epicurean and the Stoic schools which Christianity incorporated, while it corrected the one-sidedness of these philosophies.

      The Epicurean built his practical system on human weakness, the Stoic on his pride.  The gospel will not excuse sin on the ground of weakness, nor found a righteousness on man’s own pride. … Between these extremes, as between those of Sadduceeism and Phariseeism, the gospel ever makes its way.

      These academicians of Athens might well be anxious to know what the “ugly little Jew” had to say.  Long had the mighty logos or dialectic of Plato and Aristotle and their successors and rivals ruled the world.  What could the fanatical Jew have to say?  An immortal discourse is the reply to these questions of curiosity. …

      The speaker recognizes the reverence of the Athenians.  The heathen were prepared for the gospel, all the more from the weariness and failure of the age-long “groping after God.”  In the inscription on the altar was the witness of the desire to worship all forms of divinity, whether to them known or unknown.  Both Greeks and Romans recognized, above and beyond the definite gods and goddesses of the Pantheon, the indefinable in Deity, the mystery of that Essence, to us and to all, as to them, incomprehensible.

      So far we are all on a level with the Athenians. … Many there are whose heart is like the Agora of Athens or a Pantheon; one idol stands beside another.  Wrath, pride, lust, avarice, treachery, ambition – these are their gods.  And again, science, art, money, the husband, the wife, the goods of this world.  And in a neglected corner stands the altar with the inscription, “To the unknown God!”

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Acts II. p. 72, Acts 17:16-34, (E. Johnson)

 

Gold Nugget 235

Between These Extremes

 

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