Gold Nugget 326 - The Declining Path

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      The young may be habituated to sacred services, and they may be brought up in the practice of good behavior, but if they have not fully and firmly attached themselves to the Divine Lord whose praises they have been singing and shoes will they have been respecting, their piety will not endure.  “Being let go,” being released, as they must be in time, from the human restraints that hold them to the right course, they follow the bend of worldly inclination; it may be that they yield to the solicitation of unholy passion; but they decline from the path of Christian worship and godly service.

      It is a melancholy sight for the angels of God, and for all earnest human souls, to witness – that of a man who knows what is best, who has stood face to face with Christ, who has often worshipped in his house, and perhaps sate at his table, declining to lower paths … letting another power than that of his gracious Lord rule his heart and occupy his life. …

      When God’s rebuke is heard, coming through the voice of one of his ministers, or coming in his Divine providence; and when that rebuke, instead of being heeded and obeyed, is resented by the rebellious spirit, then there ensues a very rapid spiritual decline.  Men go “from bad to worse,” from indifference or forgetfulness to hostility, from doubt to disbelief, from laxity to licentiousness, from wrongness of attitude to iniquity in action.  To resent the rebuke of the Lord is to inflict upon ourselves the most serious, and too often a mortal, injury.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, II Chronicles p. 291, II Chronicles 24:17-25, (W. Clarkson)

 

Gold Nugget 326

The Declining Path

 

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