| Garden of the Heart |
Chapter 15 |
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We are to guard that which is committed unto us. It is not ours to do with as we please. A man was cruelly beating his child. When some one interfered the man said: “It’s my own boy, and I can do what I will with him.” But it was not his own by; it was God’s boy. Always that good thing committed unto us, whatever it is, belongs not to us, but to God. We shall have to account for it. When he was asked, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain resented the question. “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” He would have disclaimed responsibility, but he could not. He was indeed his brother’s keeper. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.”
What our Master wants of us is that we be faithful to every trust. Faithfulness is a great word. It is the word which our Lord used in speaking of the judgment. Those who have been faithful shall be rewarded, whether their faithfulness was in small or large matters. We are living in days of vast things – great corporations dealing in millions, great transactions involving hundreds of millions. Some of us come to think that it is scarcely worth while to do business with dollars and cents. One hundred dollars, a thousand, five thousand dollars are figures so small in comparison with the enormous sums in which the world’s great transactions are made that our little affairs seem of no account whatever. But he who is faithful in dealing with his five dollars is approved just as highly by God as he who is faithful in handling his twenty millions.
An invalid writes from California that she had consecrated her life to missionary work, hoping to go to one of the great mission fields. Instead of this, however, she has spent the years thus far in a sick room. We know, however, that Jesus is just as well pleased with what she has done, suffering for Him in sweet patience, making her chamber of pain a sanctuary of prayer and praise, as if she had been toiling in India, teaching the children, working among the women, or visiting the sick in hospitals. Faithfulness is doing what God gives us to do, and doing it patiently, sweetly, songfully. “He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
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