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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 55. The Boys and the Tramps.
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The Boys and the Tramps.
The Spirit of God adapts the words of the Bible to our needs with a simplicity that is winsome. He constantly breathes through and out of these pages, these old narrations, and verses, and sentences. He takes these words and speaks them with an inaudible but very distinct voice into one's mind. He gives them a precious meaning that fits wondrously and warmly into our needs. So it comes to pass that a passage will have a warm personal meaning fitting into some experience of one's life quite in addition to its first historical meaning.
It is a bit of the versatility of Scripture that its words have both a historical and a philosophical meaning. As originally spoken they tell perhaps of some story in a certain man's life, and then the words so spoken and written are found to have a deeply simple philosophy that applies directly to life to-day. This strikingly brings out the fact that the Scriptures answer a double purpose. There is the first purpose for which they were written centuries ago, and then a present purpose in fitting into and helping our changing, daily needs, and adapted to each man's reading. Surely this old Book is inspired; it is inbreathed with a living Spirit. There is a living presence in it fitting its words with a warm, living touch to every man and every circumstance.
I had an illustration of this one summer in a New England village. I had gone to the prayer meeting in the old white-painted Congregational church. The subject was Bible study. In the social mingling afterwards a quiet little woman said to me, "I would like to tell you of a verse that helped me greatly one time." And I listened. I seemed to know at once that I was to get something. I was standing close up to a sacred human life, and was to be allowed to look in. I listened reverently and eagerly.
Her story was a simple one. She lived on the edge of town, with the neighbors not very close. Her husband's business took him away much of the time. This bit of experience came the previous winter. She enjoyed the weekly prayer meeting and always planned to attend. Yet she knew, as she returned home from prayer meeting, that there was sure to be at least one tramp, and maybe more, taking a night's lodging in the barn back of the house. She was alone in the house so far as having a man who might protect her was concerned. Naturally enough that made her nervous and worried her. She prayed, and tried to be brave, but could not seem to quite shake off the timid worrying about it.
At that same time the superintendent of the Sunday School had asked her to teach a class of boys. She had declined. She felt that she had no gift for teaching, and that she could not do it. But he gently persisted; he was sure she could; he needed a teacher for those boys; it seemed so hard to find one; would she not think it over and pray about it before finally deciding? And she had rather reluctantly agreed to this. These were the two things uppermost in her mind at this time, the danger threatening from the tramps, and the teaching of the boys.
Her habit was to spend a little while each morning with the Bible, reading and praying. This morning of which she told me her regular course of reading brought her to the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. She was reading along in a meditative, unhurried way, praying softly as she read, and with those two things, the tramps and the boys, within easy reach in her underneath thoughts. She came to the sixteenth verse. "And," she said to me, "the first line of that verse seemed to stand out as though in bigger type: 'I have put my words in thy mouth.' " Clearly that meant the boys. She grew quiet and still. The Master was speaking to her. She sat thinking about the class, with the feeling of hesitancy not wholly gone, and yet the decision clearly made. She would teach the boys the best she could, and He would be giving her the words.
After a little prayer, still thinking about the boys, her eyes turned half mechanically to the page to continue the reading. "Then," she said to me, with a moistened glow in her eyes, "the next line stood out big just as the first had done: 'And have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand.' " That meant the tramps. It seemed to her that the wondrous Spirit had taken these words, centuries old, spoken originally to the distressed nation of Israel, and had with a wholly new, tender meaning spoken them into her heart in her need. And I felt sure, and feel sure, that she was right. And the order in which the message came seemed peculiarly helpful. First came the bit about the service needed from her, and as quickly as she responded to that call came the word of comfort for her personal needs.