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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: February 28th

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"GIRD UP YOUR LOINS"

Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning; and be ye yourselves like unto men looking for their Lord. - Luke 12:35

THE five foolish virgins did not go away into any forbidden paths. No positive evil is alleged against them. They were simply asleep. The other five were asleep, too. I do not need to enter, here and now, into the whole interpretation of the parable, or there might be much to say about the difference between these two kinds of sleep. But what I wish to notice is that there was nothing except negligence darkening into drowsiness, which caused the dying out of the light. This process of gradual extinction may be going on, and may have been going on, for a long while, and the people that carried the lamp be quite unaware of it.

How could a sleeping woman know whether her lamp was burning or not? How can a drowsy Christian tell whether his spiritual life is bright or no? To be unconscious of our approximation to this condition is, I am afraid, one of the surest signs that we are in it. I suppose that a paralyzed limb is quite comfortable. At any rate, paralysis of the spirit may be going on without our knowing anything about it.

So do not put these poor words of mine away from you, and say, "Oh! they do not apply to me," I am quite sure that the people to whom they do apply will be the last people to take them to themselves. And while I quite believe, thank God, that there are many of us who may feel and know that our lamps are not going out, sure I am that there are some of us whom everybody but themselves knows to be carrying a lamp that is so far gone out that it is smoking and stinking in the eyes and noses of the people that stand by.

Be sure that nobody was more surprised than were the five foolish women when they opened their witless, sleepy eyes, and saw the state of things.

There is only one road, with well-marked stages, by which a backsliding or apostate Christian can return to his Master. And that road has three halting-places upon it, through which our heart must pass if it have wandered from its early faith and falsified its first professions. The first of them is the consciousness of the fall, the second is the resort to the Master for forgiveness, and the last is the deepened consecration to Him. When the patriarch Abraham, in a momentary lapse from faith to sense, thought himself compelled to leave the land to which God had sent him, because a famine threatened; when he came back from Egypt, as the narrative tells us with deep significance, he went to the "place where he had pitched his tent at the beginning; to the altar which he had reared at the first." Yes! my friend; we must begin over again, tread all the old path, enter by the old wicket-gate, once more take the place of the penitent, once more make acquaintance with the pardoning Christ, once more devote ourselves in renewed consecration to His service. No man that wanders into the wilderness but comes back by the King’s highway, if He comes back at all.

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