Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Following the Christ: 71. Befriending God

Online Resource Library

Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | Download

Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Following the Christ: 71. Befriending God



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Following the Christ (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 71. Befriending God

Other Subjects in this Topic:

Befriending God

Long years afterward there was another man who helped God so decidedly that he became known as "the friend of God." And the word "friend" is used this time in the emergency sense. He did the thing God asked him to do, and this helped God in a plan He was working out for the whole race. God had to have a man. Abraham was willing to be the man. And in that he became God's helpful friend. The thing God asked him to do seems very simple, and yet it was a radical thing for this man to do. He was to leave his father's family, and all his kinsfolk, and live a separated life, both from them and from all others. It is almost impossible for the West to realize how close and strong family ties are in the Orient. Separation meant an unusual, sad break in holiest ties. God was trying a new step in His fight against sin. He had separated the leader of sin from all others. (Gen_4:12-16.) He had removed all the race except a seed of good. (Gen_6:17-18.) Both of these plans had failed, through man's failure. Now a new, farther-reaching plan is begun. A man is separated from all others, to become the seed of a new nation, a faith nation, which should be a different people from others, embodying in themselves God's ideals for all.

Abraham is asked to become a separated man in a peculiar sense, separate outwardly, separate in his worship of the true God, and separate in living a faith life. It was to be a life dependent wholly on God regardless of outer circumstance or difficulty. There was a training time of twenty-five years before Abraham was ready for the next step,—the bringing of the next in line of this new faith stock. Separation, then still further separation, an open stand for God in the land of strangers, then a series of close personal tests, each entering into the marrow of his life,—this was the training to get the man ready to be a faith father to his son, the next in line of a faith people. And the hardest test of all came after the child of faith had grown to manhood. Then he became a child of faith in his own experience, as well as in his father's. Following meant separation. It meant believing God against the unlikeliest circumstances, against nature itself, hoping in the midst of hopelessness. Everything spelled out "hopelessness." God alone spelled out "hope." He took God against everything else. It meant going to school to God, until he could be used as God planned. And Abraham consented. He followed. He helped God in His need. He befriended God; he became His friend in His need.

But every generation needs men. Each new step in the plan needs a new man. In a sore crisis of that plan, long after, another man's name, Moses, is known to us, only because he singled himself out as being willing to let God use him. In his unconscious training, the training of circumstances into which it was natural to fit, he was peculiarly prepared for the future task. Bred in Egypt as the son of the ruler's household, he received the best school training of his day, with all the peculiar advantages of his position in the royal family.

Following meant more to Moses, in what he gave up of worldly advantage, than to any other named in the Bible record. Egypt was the world empire of that day. Moses was in the innermost imperial circles, and could easily have become the dominant spirit of the court, if not the successor to the Pharaoh's throne. But he heard the call. His mother helped train his ears. He answered "Yes" to God, without knowing how much was involved. Following meant giving up, then a long course of training in the university of the desert, with the sheep and the stars and—God. It meant a repeated risking of his life not only in his bold dealings with Pharaoh, but afterward with the nation-mob, mob-nation, whose leader, and father and school-teacher, and everything else, he had to be for forty years. And it meant much on the other side, too.

"Had Moses failed to go, had God

Granted his prayer, there would have been

For him no leadership to win;

No pillared fire; no magic rod,

No smiting of the sea; no tears

Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep;

No Nebo, with a God to keep

His burial; only forty years

Of desert, watching with his sheep."