Five Young Men: Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To-dayBrown, Charles Reynolds
Religion
Five Young Men: Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To-day
Brown, Charles Reynolds
Men in the Bible
In the end that is the making of any life. Steam does all its work
under pressure. Turn it loose in the air to go where it will and it
becomes useless. In this world we must live under pressure. But Jesus
bade men face it all undaunted and radiant. He planted in their lives
an eternal hope, "Be of good cheer. I have overcome--you can."
He knew that His own purposes were entirely right--"I do always those
things that please the Father." He knew that He was strongly
entrenched in the love and confidence of those who knew Him best. He
knew that the great moral order was on His side and that He could
afford to wait for results. In that high confidence He moved ahead as
serene as the sun shining in its strength. "Be of good cheer," He
cried, when He stood within a hundred yards of Calvary.
His victory was not meant to be exceptional, it was meant to be
representative. It was to be shared and repeated by all those who walk
in fellowship with Him. How much it means when a man is making his way
through some dark forest or climbing some stiff mountainside to find
the faintest sort of a trail. "Other men have passed this way," he
cries, "and what men have done, men can do again."
Here is a trail of spiritual victory, reaching on and up through all
manner of untoward situations! His own patient, bleeding feet marked
it out and thousands of His faithful followers have traversed it in
their turn. "Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can
tribulation or distress or persecution or famine, or peril or sword?
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who
loved us. For I am persuaded that neither life nor death nor angels,
nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come,
nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
When the long, hard, dark days come it means everything to a man to
know that there is that within him which cannot go down in final
defeat. His real life, his best life, his enduring life, is hid with
Christ in God, and that life will yet have its way.
The earth is another place when it is seen to have a sky above it.
This earthly life is another thing when it is seen to have a heaven
above it and beyond it. We are saved by hope, by the hope of life
abundant, life enduring, life eternal, which shines on and on, no
matter how earth's clouds may come and go.
When all else seems to fail we look up and hear this young man say,
"Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in Me.
In My Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have
told you. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am there ye may
be. Be of good cheer, I have overcome and by My grace you will."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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