Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and SermonsElmslie, William Gray
Religion
Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons
Elmslie, William Gray
Elmslie, William Gray, 1848-1889; Sermons, English -- 19th century; Theologians -- Scotland -- Biography
"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice,
and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and
he with Me."—REV. iii. 20.
God is close to us. Every moment of our life He is doing countless
things in us and around us. If a man were to do these things we should
see him with our eyes, we could touch him with our hands; we should not
fail to observe his presence. Because we cannot see God with our bodily
eye, or grasp Him with our hand, we forget His working, we lose sight of
His nearness.
When you were children, some time or other, I suppose, in your young
lives, you got hold of a flower-seed, and planted it in a pot of moist
earth, and set it in the sunniest corner of your room. Morning after
morning, when you awoke, you ran to see if the flower had begun to grow.
At last your eagerness was rewarded by the sight of some tiny leaves
which had sprung up during one night. Then the stalk appeared, frail and
tender, and then more leaves, and buds, and branchlets, till at length
there stood, blooming before you, a fair and fragrant flower.
Who made it? Somebody worked to produce that flower. It could not make
itself. The dead earth could not shape that lovely leaf; the bright
sunshine could not paint those tendrils. A deep-thinking man, when he
sees these wonderful things, must ask himself, Who fashioned them? Not
the sunshine nor the air, but God, if there is a God, willed that that
plant should grow. God toiled to make the plant—in your room, at your
side.
At this moment, in your breast, your heart is beating. All your life it
has gone on beating. It is not you who sustain its motion. Even when you
forget it, when you are asleep, its pulsations do not cease. Somebody
works to keep your heart beating. God, who is the foundation of all
life, out of whose loving heart it streams, and back to whom it must
return, has to remember your heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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