Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 26th

THE SAINTS’ PUPILLAGE

Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning. - Proverbs 9:9

The world is God’s nursery. There are many mansions in the Father’s house; and this is where He keeps the little ones. That is the true meaning of everything that befalls us. It is education. It would not be worth doing at all if it were not. Life is given to us to teach us how to live, to exercise our powers, to give us habits and facilities of working. We are like boys in a training-ship that lies for most of the time in harbor, and now and then goes out upon some short and easy cruise, not for the sake of getting anywhere in particular, but for the sake of exercising the lads in seamanship. There is no meaning worthy of us - to say nothing of God-in anything that we do, unless it is looked upon as schooling. We all say we believe that. Alas! I am afraid very many of us forget it.

But that conception of the meaning of each event that befalls us carries with it the conception of the whole of this life as being an education towards another. I do not understand how any man can bear to live here, and to do all his painful work, unless he thinks that by it he is getting ready for the life beyond; and that "nothing can bereave him of the force that he made his own, being here." The rough ore is turned into steel by being

" Plunged into baths of hissing tears,

And heated all with hopes and fears,

And battered with the shocks of doom."

And then - what then? Is an instrument thus fashioned and tempered and polished destined to be broken and "thrown as rubbish into the void"? Certainly not! If this life is education, as is obvious upon its very face, then there is a place where we shall exercise the facilities that we have acquired here, and manifest in loftier forms the characters which we have made our own.

If we carry these thoughts with us habitually, what a difference it will make upon everything that befalls us! You hear men often maundering and murmuring about the mysteries of the pain and sorrow and suffering of this world, wondering if there is any loving will behind it all. That perplexed questioning goes on the hypothesis that life is meant mainly for enjoyment or for material good. If we once apprehended in its all applicable ranges this simple truth, that life is a discipline, we should have less difficulty in understanding what people call the mysteries of Providence. I do not say it would interpret everything, but it would interpret an immense deal. It would make us eager, as each event came, to find out its special mission, and what it was meant to do for us. It would dignify trifles, and bring down the overwhelming magnitude of the so-called great events, and would make us lords of ourselves, and lords of circumstances, and ready to wring the last drop of possible advantage out of each thing that befell us. Life is a Father’s discipline.