Have not many of us to complain that the enemies of God's people still
like to plunder our harvest fields? How Satan grasps at our elder
scholars! He is not content with gutter-children. He likes to take our
young men and women, and so we hear drunken men quote scripture, and
bloated women hum psalm tunes!
What shall we do? We read, "The people fled from the Philistines." Shall
we leave the results of our Sunday school work in the hands of the enemy?
Is it not time that we made a stand? The thing is becoming monotonous,
so much so, that in some places it is thought not worth being grieved
about, that the young men and women, who have passed through our schools,
never attend the chapel, and are lost to us for years, if not for ever!
"Soldiers of Christ arise!"
If a lad enlists, and is sent to Aldershot, we soon put the chaplain on
his track, and shall we not do something for those who are carried away
by those sons of Anak which we call the theatre and racecourse? Would it
not pay us to have a holy band of men and women to hunt up our lapsed
scholars, and to fight for the harvest we sowed and have waited for so
long, only to see it carried away by the Philistines?
In all our large towns there are neighbourhoods where the enemy of God
and man is strongly entrenched. And yet there are churches and chapels
in those streets. The few who attend those places pass houses, once
respectable, but now given up to vice. Homes where there was once family
worship, are now, to use the words of the Wise man, "The way of hell,
going down to the chambers of death."
What is to be done? "There are not many members now." "There is no one
to work." So it might have been said in the bean-field; the people were
gone, all gone but Shammah. He stood, and God showed, then, as now, that
He was prepared to stand by the minority, if it were loyal to Him, for He
wrought a great, not an ordinary one, but a great victory!
There are yet great victories to be won when we turn on our pursuers.
Don't be carried away by bad example. We go with a multitude to do evil,
when we refuse to fight for the results of past work done by ourselves or
our fathers. Shammah seems to have said, "If I am to die, I will die
here among the beans. Better so than pine to death for want of them." Is
it not true that with the harvest of our toil they carry away our faith
in God, and in His word? Much of the Bible is lost to those who flee
rather than fight. A great deal of our hymn book is for
"BELIEVERS FIGHTING."
Those battle songs cannot be enjoyed by men who never leave the barracks.
No wonder the old tunes are not sung by craven hearts. Let those of us
who have left Shammah to fight alone, rejoin him, then we shall have the
joy of conquest, and the gladness of those who divide the spoil.
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