James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Timothy 4:17 - 4:17

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James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Timothy 4:17 - 4:17


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THE LORD’S PRESENCE

‘Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me and strengthened me.’

2Ti_4:17

In the terror of that time, when to be a Christian was to be at least, in public opinion, an atheist and an anarchist, none dared hold a brief for the leader of that abominated sect; St. Paul had to plead alone. Ah, but not alone. He tells us that then once more that Presence he had known of old came and mysteriously overshadowed him.

I. The great martyr’s experience has repeated itself through all the ages; for the Personage Who caused it is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

II.—Our Christian life is in many respects so traditionally easy that it is in grave risk of becoming merely perfunctory. And at the heart of a merely perfunctory religion it is strange if there is not setting in, however imperceptibly at times, the mortification of unbelief.

III. The truest training for some great thing for God is fidelity to Him in the next familiar little thing. And most certainly we shall find, when we look at all into the heart of matters, that full fidelity to God in common life is a victory which demands for its achievement nothing less than the secret of the saints. For this, among other things, the glorious annals of holy suffering are given us. Not only, not mostly, to win our loving wonder for the sufferers. No, the supreme lesson of these records of pain and glory is another. It is the lesson of what Jesus Christ can be in all the needs and all the weaknesses of His people.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘In the Chinese massacres of a few years ago Mrs. Atwater, an American missionary, found herself face to face with death. “I am preparing for the end,” she wrote to a friend, “very quietly and calmly. The Lord is wonderfully near, and He will not fail me. I was very restless and excited when there seemed a chance of life, but God has taken away that feeling … The pain will soon be over, and oh, the sweetness of the welcome above. My little one will go with me; I think God will give it to me in heaven.… I cannot imagine the Saviour’s welcome.” ’