Gold Nugget 174 - The Foundation Principle

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      Walls are built, not upon two, but upon one foundation.  So is every man’s character.  There is some one principle on which it is organized, some one fount to which you can trace all the streams of human activity.  The principle is the paramount affection of the man.  Whatever he loves most, governs him.  If he loves pleasure most, his character is sensual; if he loves money most, his character is worldly; if he loves wisdom most, his character is philosophic; if he loves God most, his character is Divine …

      Character is not formed of one set of actions, thoughts, impulses, volitions.  All kinds of acts enter into it, mental, moral, muscular, personal, political, religious – all are materials in the building. …

      You cannot build a house in a day; stone by stone it must advance; so the formation of character is a slow work.  Men cannot become either devils or saints at once, cannot spring into these characters by a bound.  It takes time to build up a Satan, and a longer time still to build up a seraph within us.  Acts make habits; habits make character.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Amos p. 155, Amos 7:7-9, (D. Thomas)

 

Gold Nugget 174

The Foundation Principle

 

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Gold Nugget 173 - In Search of Happiness (The Loss of Self)

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      There are men who imagine that by teaching children the arts of reading, writing, ciphering, and the rudiments of science they will improve the morality of the nation.  When you remember that the moral character grows out of the heart and not out of the brain, out of the likings and dislikings, not out of the ideas or intelligence, all this seems as absurd as the attempt to make horse run on rocks.  Secular knowledge cannot change the heart, cannot alter a man’s likes or dislikes.  It may strengthen them, but not alter them.  Dishonesty, uneducated, may commit petty thefts; but educated, it will legally swindle a nation.  Knowledge, alas! is all in vain. …

      All mankind are in search of happiness. … The great bulk seek happiness from without, from what they can see, and taste, and hear, and handle.  They look for happiness in the titillation of the nerves and the gratification of the senses.  Now, were man nothing but body, this would do.  This does for the brute and the bird.  But man is spirit; and matter in no form or combination can satisfy spirit.

      A man’s life, or happiness, consisteth not in the abundance of material things.  True happiness springs from within, not from without; arises from holy loves, hopes, aspirations, and aims.  In one word, love is the well of water that springs up unto everlasting life. …

      There are men in all Churches who give themselves to saving souls, as they say.  Salvation is the burden of all their thought and talk.  But how do they endeavour to accomplish their object?  By everlasting appeals to the selfish fears and hopes of men. … But can this save the soul?  Impossible. … Salvation consists in the extinction of all that is selfish in human nature, and in the generating, fostering, and perfecting disinterested, self-oblivious love. … The man who tries to save souls by constant appeals to the selfishness of human nature acts more absurdly than he who attempts to gallop horses upon the sharp peaks of rugged rocks.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Amos p. 132-133, Amos 6:12, (D. Thomas)

 

Gold Nugget 173 

In Search of Happiness (The Loss of Self)

 

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Gold Nugget 172 - Time to Keep Silence

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      The truth of God and the sinful heart are uncongenial.  Men love the darkness and hate the light.  The truth forbidding all lust is actually through the corruption of our nature the occasion of stirring it up.  This, of course, is no reason for withholding it or suppressing our testimony to it.  But there are circumstances and moods in which this tendency attains its maximum of strength, and it will then be prudent to keep silence “even from good.”

      It is as “fishers of men” that we speak the truth, and we must justify our claim to the title by presenting the truth in the time and way in which it is most likely to tell.  If we “testify” at random, and uniformly, in all companies and on all occasions, we shall oftener harm than help the people whom we wish to serve. …

      There is such a thing as “casting pearls before the seine” to no better purpose than the prostitution of sacred things. … To force it on men when they are out of humour and will not give it a fair hearing is only to bring it into contempt – to lessen its dignity in the eyes of others, and diminish its change of winning their acceptance.  The truth is meant to sanctify and save, and we must be careful to do nothing that would place it at a disadvantage in the work. …

      There is room for judgment and discretion in timing and planning the work of winning souls.  The most acceptable service and the most useful we can give to God is our “reasonable service.”  … The characters of the “time to keep silence” deserve attention no less than those of the “time to speak,” and he has mastered both who rightly divides the Word of life.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Amos p. 94, Amos 5:13, (Edgar Henry)

See also:  Romans 7:7-9, Matthew 7:6

 

Gold Nugget 172

Time to Keep Silence

 

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Gold Nugget 171 - Worship Is No Proof

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      Men crowd churches, attend to religious ceremonies, and contribute to religious institutions purely with the idea of avoiding hell and getting to a happier world than this.  They do not serve God for naught.  Selfishness, which is bad everywhere, is never worse than when engaged in religion. …

      When religion is attended to as a matter of form, when sentiments are expressed without conviction, services rendered without self-sacrifice, the insincerity is an insult to Omniscience. … Abounding worship is no proof of abounding virtue and abounding godliness.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Amos p. 80, Amos 4: 4-5, (D. Thomas)

 

Gold Nugget 171

Worship Is No Proof

Gold Nugget 170 - The River of Our Life

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      The great river appropriately represented the great nation which it enriched; and the picture of the fall of the kingdom includes the desertion of the banks of these “great waters” by man and beast; … and also the sinking of the river itself … Such a river as the Nile may well illustrate –

      A noble life.  It is a source of beauty and fertility, and therefore of enrichment, to the land through which it runs.  Itself an object of delight to the eye, it is the source of verdure all along its banks.  By its overflow, or through simple agricultural appliances, its waters the whole district in which it flows, and makes all the difference between barrenness and abundance.  Thousands of animals drink of it and bathe in it, while the inhabitants of town and village flock to its banks in their various necessities.

      A noble human life may be all this in a higher sphere.  It may add very considerably to that spiritual worth and beauty on which Christ looks down with Divine Satisfaction.  It may be the source of all kinds of good – of health, of sustenance, of knowledge, of wisdom, of purity, of piety; of life at its best below, of the beginning of the life eternal.

      It is a constant source of blessing.  As the river runs, not spasmodically, but night and day, continually sending forth its refreshing and nourishing moisture into the land, so a true, Christian life is incessantly and unconsciously communicating good, in many forms, to those around it.

      A life pitifully reduced.  A very pitiful sight would be a river in such a state as that here imagined (rather than foreseen).  Instead of being what it once was, it is now to the prophet’s eye a diminished stream, its waters are low … and lie far beneath its banks; and they are such that no beast cares to drink of them; no man approaches to use them for the purposes of human life, whether of nourishment or of cleansing.  The river is useless, worthless, abandoned to itself.

      How much more pitiable is the life that has been reduced; the life that has sunk; that moves not any longer on the higher plane of heavenly wisdom but only on the low and muddy levels of selfishness, of covetousness, of a base indulgence; the life that has shriveled up into a poor dirty stream, no longer reflecting the beauty that is about it or the glory that is above it; the life that is unvisited, that no man cares to consult, by which no virtuous man directs his own, from which no man gains any strength, or impetus, or pure refreshment, which does no man any spiritual good; the life that is severely left alone!

      The cause of its decline.  If any river be thus actually reduced … it is because it is no longer fed as it once was by the rains of heaven.  If a noble human life is thus reduced, it is because it is no longer supplied from above.  It lacks the truth, the influences, the sustaining power, which should come to it from God.  These may be cut off by some serious sin; or they may be withdrawn because we no longer keep open the channels through which they come.

      Keep the mind open to all Divine wisdom and the heart to all holy influences.  Draw down the renewing rains of Heaven by constant communion and earnest prayer.  See that no “great transgression” diverts the waters; and the river of our life will flow on to the sea, without loss to its beauty or its power.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Ezekiel II p. 181, Ezekiel 32:13-14, (W. Clarkson)

 

Gold Nugget 170

The River of Our Life

 

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Gold Nugget 169 - Imitative Creatures

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      We are such imitative creatures that we are prone to do as our neighbours do, without questioning the propriety of their conduct.  Whenever we adopt the ordinary standard of life, without inquiring how it is related to the Divine standard, we are conforming to the worldly spirit.  The worldly conduct may be much higher in one age than in another, and in one country than in another; but the essence of worldliness is unquestioning conformity to the standard of our neighbours.

      An individual loses mental as well as moral power, who conforms without question to the worldly customs of his time, and thus sacrifices his manhood.  The easy-going, popular individual, who does this, that, and the other, for fear of being thought singular, is found to have very little strength of mind to begin with, and less every day he lives.  In fact, nature is constructed upon the principle that the despised talent of manhood is forfeited when not employed, and there is clear descent in the scale of being. …

      To bow down to the customs of even the best society or the highest civilization without inquiring how these customs stand toward the Divine Law, is to sacrifice our birthright of manliness for a mess of the rudest pottage.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Leviticus p. 278-280, Leviticus 18:1-30, (R. M. Edgar)

 

Gold Nugget 169

Imitative Creatures

 

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Gold Nugget 168 - Departure and Return

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      The material securities fail us; the ship sinks, the bank breaks, the mine is exhausted, the company is defrauded and has to be wound up, trade declines, and our earthly prop is gone.  The human help we built upon disappears; our friend sickens, or he is killed in the fatal accident, or he is himself stripped and helpless, or he is estranged from us and discards us.  Our hope becomes our disappointment, our pride becomes our shame; we have been staying on that which smites us. …

      When the dark hour comes, when the soul sits desolate, when our heart is wounded by the very hand which we hoped would help and heal us, in that day may we hear the voice of the Father we have forsaken, calling to us and saying “Return unto me;” “I will heal your backslidings, I will love you freely.”

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Isaiah p. 196, Isaiah 10:20-23, (W. Clarkson)

 

Gold Nugget 168

Departure and Return

 

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Gold Nugget 167 - A Species of Insanity

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      The Preacher found the way of pleasure as little fitted to conduct to felicity as that of wisdom; discovered in fact, that laughter occasioned by indulgence in sensual delights was only a species of insanity, a kind of delirious intoxication which stupefied the reason and overthrew the judgment … So has every one who has sought his chief good in such enjoyment found.  They who live and pleasure are dead while they live – dead to all the soul’s higher aspirations; are self-deceived; and will in the end have a rude awakening, when they find that their shout-lived pleasures have only been nourishing them for slaughter.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Ecclesiastes p. 39, Ecclesiastes 2:1-11, (T. Whitelaw)

See also I Timothy 5:6, Titus 3:3, Hebrews 11:25, James 5:5

 

Gold Nugget 167

A Species of Insanity

 

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Gold Nugget 166 - The Dearth of Worldly Knowledge

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      Doubts, which frequently settle down into definite agnosticism, beset the man who is given to great intellectual activity.  And then, too, the fact remains that we cannot by sheer reasoning come to any definite conclusions as to any of the great questions which most concern our happiness.  No one can by searching find out God – reach definite knowledge concerning him, his existence, nature, and character; or be assured of the fact of there being an overruling Providence, of the efficacy of prayer, of a life beyond the grave, or of the immortality of the soul.  Probable or plausible opinions may be formed, but certainty comes only by revelation and faith. …

      “Science boasts vaingloriously of her progress, yet mocks us with her grand discovery of progress through pain, telling of small advantages for the few purchased by enormous waste of life, by internecine conflict and competition, and by a deadly struggle with Nature herself, ‘red in tooth and claw with ravin,’ greedy to feed on the offspring of her own redundant fertility.

      The revelations of geology and astronomy deepen our depression.  The littleness of our lives and the insignificance of our concerns become more conspicuous in comparison with the long and slow procession of the aeons which have gone before, and with the vast ocean of being around us, driven and tossed by enormous, complicated, and unresting forces.  A new significance is thus given to the words, ‘In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow’” (Tyler)

      In his celebrated engraving of ‘Melancolia,’ Albert Durer has with wonderful skill depicted this mood of intellectual depression.  He represents a winged figure, that of a woman seated by the seashore and looking intently into the distance, with bent brows and proud, pensive demeanour.  Her thoughts are absorbed in somber meditation, and her wings are folded.  A closed book is in her lap.  Near her stands a dial-plate, and above it a bell, that strikes the hours as they pass.  The sun is rapidly nearing the horizon-line, and darkness will soon enshroud the earth.  In her right hand she holds a compass and a circle, emblematic of that infinity of time and space upon which she is meditating.  Around her are scattered the various implements of art, and the numerous appliances of science.  They have served her purpose, and she now casts them aside, and listlessly ponders on the vanity of all human calculations.  Above her is an hour-glass, in which the sands are running low, emblematic of the shortness of the time yet left for fresh schemes and efforts. 

      In like manner the Preacher found that on the moral side increase of knowledge meant increase of sorrow.  Knowledge of the true ideal only made him the more conscious of the distance we are from it, and of the hopelessness of our efforts to reach it.  The further the research is carried, the more abundant is the evidence discoverable of our moral nature being in a condition of disorder.  We find that conscience too often reigns without governing, that natural appetites and desires refuse to submit to her rule, that often motives and feelings which she distinctly condemns, such as pride, envy, selfishness, and cruelty, direct and animate our conduct.

      All schools of philosophy have recognized the fact of moral disorder in our nature.  It is, needed, unfortunately too evident to be denied or explained away.  Aristotle says, “We are more naturally disposed towards those things which are wrong, and more easily carried away to excess than to propriety of conduct.”  And Hume, “We naturally desire what is forbidden, and often take a pleasure in performing actions merely because they are unlawful.  The notion of duty when opposite to the passions is not always able to overcome them; and when it fails of that effect, is apt rather to increase and irritate them, by producing an opposition in our motives and principles.”  But it is not necessary to multiply testimony to a fact so generally acknowledged.

      How this moral disorder originated in human nature is a problem which philosophy is unable to solve, just as it is lacking in ability to correct it.  It can discern the symptoms and character of the disease, and describe the course it takes, but cannot cure it.  And so the existence of disturbing and lawless forces in our moral nature, the power of evil habit, the social inequalities and disorders which result from the perversity of the individuals of whom society is made up. And the varying codes of morals which exist in the world, are all calculated to distress and perplex him who seeks to make that straight which is crooked, and to supplement that which is defective.  Increase of knowledge brings increase of sorrow.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Ecclesiastes p. 30-31, Ecclesiastes 2:12-18, (J. Willcock)

 

Gold Nugget 166

The Dearth of Worldly Knowledge

 

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Postscript:  (CAH)

 

      It should be noted that this discourse does not suggest that man can not comprehend God or His plans to the degree necessary towards achieving a successful and happy life, but that it is impossible to depend solely on knowledge gained from science and from worldly observation.  Without the revelation delivered from God to man, we could only achieve an imperfect and distorted image of God:  imperfect because of mans’ limitations and distorted because of mans’ selfish-motives.  Without revelation we could obtain no real peace within ourselves concerning our ultimate potential destiny.  This peace is the crown of our spiritual blessings during our life on this tiny pebble we call earth. 

      The natural world discloses only hints of the real, but unseen, spiritual dimensions of the universe.  Without revelation there would be no certainty and, therefore, no hope of overcoming the natural weaknesses that contribute to the battles that we fight daily between the worldly and the spiritual.  Without Godly revelation we would all succumb to death and have no manner of knowing that there was One who came, lived and died for all, and that through that universal sacrifice, we all can become holy and acceptable to the Holy One and fit for His habitation.  Without revelation we would have no certain knowledge of the endless spiritual life that can be obtained, or of the endless spiritual death that will result for those who choose the natural over the spiritual.  

      It must also be noted that there are suggestions within the discourse of the doctrine of the “natural depravity” of man.  However, this is not a universal doctrine of all who profess themselves as Christians.  It should be well considered that as God’s creations, we are created perfect, but that because we live in a natural (physical) world and because the temporary ruler of the word (the Prince of the air) is allowed to “sparkle” for a time and appeal to mans natural (worldly) passions, that this is the reason for the moral confusion and deterioration that so obviously exist in the world.  No man, however strong spiritually, is exempt from these temptations.  Our will is our own and we are free to chose out own way.  We are not corrupted from the inside out, but from the several and powerful influences from without. 

      The natural road is broad (proud), twisted (uncertain), confused (contradictory) and crowded (naturally influenced)). It leads, at best, to nowhere; at worst to an eternally dark, pained and Godless existence – devoid of love and goodness.. 

      The spiritual path is narrow (humble), straight (certain) and simple (one way), and few (spiritually discerned)) there are who find it.  It leads at worst to nowhere; at best to an eternal life, in an eternal place, in an eternal and Godful dimension called Heaven – with absolute goodness and unlimited love.

      It is ultimately a matter of faith:  faith in the natural and limited knowledge of man or faith in the Divine revelations delivered through the agency of man.    CAH

 

I Corinthians 2:1-2, 4-7, 10-11, 13-15, 16

 

      “And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God.  For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  … And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

      However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age … But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom of God ordained before the ages for our glory. …

      But God as revealed them to us through His Spirit.  For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.  … These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches … But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. … But we have the mind of Christ.”

Gold Nugget 165 - Home Joys

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      Here and throughout the Bible the sanctity of the home is insisted on as something to be guarded inviolably.  It is evident that this beautiful institution is in harmony with our nature.  To live according to nature is not to indulge ill-regulated passions, to follow chance impulses, to subordinate reason and conscience to instinct and appetite.  It is to live so as to secure the harmonious working of our whole nature and of the general body of mankind.  Thus regarded, family life is natural; it falls in best with the requirements of the race, it ministers best to its advancement.

      Polygamy is always degrading.  As men rise in the moral scale they cast it off.  The home is the foundation of the state.  Where home life is most corrupt social and political institutions are in greatest danger. … May no corrupt casuistry ever dare to lay its foul finger on these holy shrines!  The worst fruits of atheism and of the confessional are seen in specious pretexts for committing that horrible sacrilege. …

      They who break through the restraints of home life in the feverish thirst for illicit delights little know what joys they are losing.  The poison-fruits of a pandemonium let a blight fall on the sweet, fresh beauty of what might have been a very garden of Eden.  For the restraints which look to libertines so irksome are just the very conditions of the most lasting, most satisfying, most wholesome of human joys. 

      The strong love of husband and wife, the parents’ pleasure in their children, the innumerable little interest of the home circle, and all that is typified by the “fireside,” are delights unknown to men who profess to make the pursuit of pleasure their aim in life.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Proverbs p. 115, Proverbs 5:15, (W. F. Adeney)

 

Gold Nugget 165

Home Joys

 

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