A Lent in earnest : $b or, Sober thoughts for solemn days — John Shaqi
A Lent in earnest : $b or, Sober thoughts for solemn daysGuernsey, Lucy Ellen
General
A Lent in earnest : $b or, Sober thoughts for solemn days
Guernsey, Lucy Ellen
Devotional literature; Lent -- Prayers and devotions; Prayers
You are perhaps a Sunday-school teacher or pupil. (You should, if
possible, be one or the other.) If so, you have the subject of your
meditation cut out for you in your next Sunday's lesson. I advise you
to begin by memorizing it. In that way you can carry it about with you
wherever you go. Then turn it over in your mind, verse by verse, yea,
word by word. Sift it as if you were hunting for diamonds.
Say to yourself, "Do I understand the exact meaning of this word, or
that allusion? How shall I explain that point? How shall I frame a
question which shall make the pupil bring out the meaning for himself?"
And finally, "What does the lesson teach me?" For, be assured,
unless it does say something to you, you will never make it speak to
any one else. If there were more of this kind of preparation, the
superintendent would not so often be grieved by the sorrowful spectacle
of a teacher sitting idly before an idle class, because he or she "has
finished the lesson, and does not know what to say."
Permit me to give a short example to illustrate my meaning. Take the
first verse of the second chapter of St. Matthew—a simple passage, and
very familiar. "Jesus was born in Bethlehem." Where is Bethlehem? What
do I know about its situation, its distance from Jerusalem, its history
and present condition? Was it the home of Jesus' parents? How did He
happen to be born there? Then come the momentous questions: Who was
this babe of Bethlehem? Why was He born? What is He to me? And so you
see, this simple historical verse lifts for you the veil of the Holy of
Holies, where you can but wonder and adore.
The prayer-book, also, will furnish abundant subjects for thought.
Take the collect for the day; say, for example, the ninth Sunday after
Trinity, which has a direct bearing on this subject. Why is it so
important to have right thoughts? What is the relation between thinking
and doing? What passages of Scripture bearing on this point can I
remember? And so on through the whole collect. There is, perhaps, not a
prayer in the Church service which will not afford matter for a week's
meditation; and no one knows the wealth concealed in the prayer-book
who has not treated it in this way. Try it, and see if at the end of
the Lenten season the Church service does not say more to you than ever
it did before.
Ps. cxix. 1-24. 2 Peter 1.
NOTE.—The substance of this and the next chapter was printed in "Church
Work," some time ago.
_THIRD WEDNESDAY IN LENT._
_MEDITATION—Continued._
"MEDITATION is all very well for people of leisure," says some one,
"but I am busy from morning till night. I have no time."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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