5. And, then,--it is a sufficiently startling thing to say, but--we must
learn to be patient with God also. All our patience, and all the
exercises of it, if we think aright about it, all run up in the long-run
into patience with God. But there are some exercises of patience that
have to do directly and immediately with God and with God alone. When
any man's heart has become fully alive to God and to the things of God;
when he begins to see and feel that he lives and moves and has his being
in God; then everything that in any way affects him is looked on by him
as come to him from God. Absolutely, all things. The very weather that
everybody is so atheistic about, the climate, the soil he labours, the
rain, the winter's cold and the summer's heat,--true piety sees all these
things as God's things, and sees God's immediate will in the disposition
and dispensation of them all. He feels the untameableness of his tongue
in the indecent talk that goes on everlastingly about the weather. All
these things may be without God to other men, as they once were to him
also, but you will find that the truly and the intelligently devout man
no longer allows himself in such unbecoming speech. For, though he
cannot trace God's hand in all the changes of the seasons, in heat and
cold, in sunshine and snow, yet he is as sure that God's wisdom and will
are there as that Scripture is true and the Scripture-taught heart.
'Great is our Lord, and His understanding is infinite. Who covereth the
heavens with clouds, and prepareth rain for the earth, and maketh the
grass to grow upon the mountains. He giveth snow like wool; He
scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes; He casteth forth His ice like
morsels. Who can stand before his cold?' Here is the patience and the
faith of the saints. Here are they that keep the commandments of God and
the faith of Jesus Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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