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Devotional: September 14th

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" The Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be confounded." - Isaiah 1:7.

Help is needed to discharge duties that are too great for us, to encounter dangers that are too severe for us, to face enemies that are too powerful for us, to bear up under sore disappointments, under the loss of friends, of health, of fortune, to sustain the consciousness of our deep demerit, and in fact it is difficult to exhaust the catalog of the ends for which we need help. Yet there are very few who are visited with a sense of any such need as this. The reason is that men generally take no cognizance of their real duties, are not aware of their real enemies, avoid as far as they can the path of present danger, and stultify themselves with ideas of their own goodness. The man that does not attempt to climb the Alps has no need of a guide; the mariner who mystifies himself as to the condition of his ship and denies his danger, rejects the offer of help.

We need help from God to know our helplessness. The greatest of all our enemies is in the royal chamber of our inmost being and rules us with a rod of iron, though it be bound about with ivy leaves. We need help from God himself to become aware of the true character of this enthroned enemy, and to see the desolations he has wrought in our heritage. Alas for them who know not their need of help. The triumph of their foe is complete. They are led captive at his will, even though we see them occupying the high places of the earth, admired and followed by vast crowds.

It requires but little faith, comparatively, to use the language of this text when there is a very inadequate idea of the difficulties, dangers, impediments, humiliations that may be found in one’s path. If a believer entertains the idea that the covenant relation in which he stands to the Lord, secures him against any very severe stroke, he may then use this language without knowing what he says. But he has a wrong idea. The Lord sometimes appoints unto his people tasks of a most formidable character, trials that seem studiously calculated to grind them to powder. If there be some contingency that the believer deprecates with all the might of his soul, the mere imagination of which is utterly dreadful to him, so that he is ready to say, " I will cheerfully meet all other conceivable forms of trial rather than this," it is not impossible that the Lord may see fit to single out this very trial for him.

The Lord wishes his people to feel that being allied to him, they are allied to all strength and need fear no evil. But he proceeds with unspeakable gentleness. He gives experience of his power to sustain, in various ways. He gives a sense of his own love, wisdom, and faithfulness that prepares the heart to encounter the desolation which it speedily dreads. And by the time that we come into the presence of the dreaded thing, faith has so far forgot the victory, that we wonder at ourselves for ever having felt such a shrinking from a trial so easily borne. Then is the Lord glorified.

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