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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems: 21. God Needs Men.
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 21. God Needs Men.
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God Needs Men.
When God would do anything among men He chooses and uses a man. When He wanted to grow a nation that would stand for the highest ideals of revealed religion, even as later Greece stood for letters, and Rome for the power of organization, He chose a man up in the Euphrates Valley. And about this man, Abraham, He began slowly to build up that strange people which has had the greatest influence of any upon the nations of the earth. When that nation, not yet fully born as a nation, was in sore danger of being throttled in its birth, He took a man, Moses, chosen from his birth, graduate in the highest learning of earth's best schools, with a postgraduate degree from the University of Arabia, and who has left the indelible marks of his native gifts and special training upon that people, and upon the life of the whole race.
With deepest reverence be it said, when God would redeem a world He sent a Man. That Man was as truly a man as though not infinitely more. Yet His character clearly marks Him off from all other men. When He would awaken the life of the whole earth by awakening its head, He chose a man, Luther. One cannot think of that vast moral and mental upheaval of Europe which took so long to reach its flood tide without having his vision filled with the figure of the German giant, and about him grouped, through the years of that movement of staggering, regenerating power, such men as scholarly Wycliff in England, brave Huss in Bohemia, eloquent Savonarola in Italy, the keen and logical statesman Calvin in Geneva, and rugged Knox in Scotland.
When He would build up a new nation on the westernmost continent to stand for liberty, He chose the stalwart Virginian, Washington. And when that nation itself was to be taught liberty, and held together in its hour of severest testing as a nation, He chose the English giant of Kentucky and Illinois, Lincoln. And later yet, when He would teach the privileges of liberty to those whose only birthright was slavery, He chose a black Washington for the rare, difficult task.
But one must never let the leaders make him forget the faithful common folk without whom no leader could do his work. The common everyday life, not told by the history writer, is dependent even more upon the individual man, whether it be the manning of the ship, or the running of the railroad, or the weaving of life's common web anywhere. Success and happiness depend upon the one man, in the thick of things, quietly doing the commonplace things, with an uncommon, faithful steadiness.