GOD'S Pattern For Us

Beloved, here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this everyday world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.

God’s promises, and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our everyday experience.

It is most helpful to us to realize that we have a God who thus comes into the most commonplace things.

It is no evidence that He has failed us if He allows ten thousand difficulties on every side to throng us, and if He delivers us in answer to prayer at last through straits so narrow that we seem to be barely delivered at the very point of disaster and from the very jaws of destruction. 

Let us therefore not be discouraged if God lets the way be hard and the path be long and the feet sometimes grow weary.

He is with us still working just as truly as if He was the moving pillar of cloud and flame with us; as He walked with them to Emmaus so simple, so unobtrusive, so like themselves that they never realized it was the Lord until their hearts began to burn within them through His kindling words and wondrous teachings. 

Let us learn to recognize Him in the hard places. Let us learn to see Him in the little things. 

Let us be willing to take the answer to our prayers and the fulfillment of our life purpose in the most commonplace things.

Thus everything shall become sacred and life shall be all sublime, and some day "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off" (Isa. 55:13). 

~A. B. Simpson~