Then the word of the Lord came to Samuel: "I am grieved that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions." Samuel was troubled, and he cried out to the Lord all that night. 1 Samuel 15:10-11

All night long? That's a long time, and a whole lot of agony. What did Saul pray? Was he despairing, angry, disappointed, threatened, hopeful? Did he take Saul's failure as king personally?

At any rate, the next morning, all blurry-eyed, Samuel and Saul "had it out." Saul was clueless as ever. "But I did obey," he whined.

"Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice," Samuel declared.

That ended the argument. But Saul was finished. His short-lived rule had peaked, and now would be torn from him. He begged to no avail. The scene is pathetic. Too late. What's done is done.

Ah, but here comes chapter 16. God sets Samuel in motion, on a mission to anoint the next king, the king through whose line the Promised One would be born.

You know the story. Jesse's sons get paraded in front of Samuel. None of them are it. Finally David, the sheepboy is sent for, and stands before Samuel.

Then the Lord said, "Rise and aniont him; he is the one." 1 Samuel 16:12

Whenever lamps burn low in the Church, and love waxes cold, and watchers slumber while the Bridegroom tarries, the Restorer and Sustainer of His people is always standing at the door.

He can create fresh witnesses to Himself in the most unlikely  quarters, even even as He raised up Paul from among the Pharisees, and Luther from among the Mendicants. The Gospel of the grace of God has been disproved a great number of times - it has been assailed and wounded and beaten down and left for dead - but it survives by the power of an endless life.

Amid fightings within and fears without the modern Church can still say, "I know that my Redeemer lives." Who can guess what swift, incalculable revival Christ has in store for His desponding people?

JOHN HUTTON
in the British Weekly, January 7, 1926
(Quoted from THE FIRST FOURTY YEARS by Ian Murray on the life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones p 152)

If you want to read a page-turner of a missionary autobiography beautifully recounted, you must read John Paton recalling his days in the New Hebrides.  This group of islands in the South Pacific now forms the nation of Vanuatu.

Born and raised in Scotland, Paton has fond memories of the home he was raised in as the oldest of eleven children. The tribute he pays his father is touching in itself, but it also emphasizes how much of our faith is caught, and not just learned head knowledge. The time he describes is 1840ish...

Our home consisted of...a mid-room, or chamber, called the "closet." The one end was my mother's domain, and served all the purposes of kitchen and dining room and parlor, besides containing two large wooden erections, called by our Scotch peasantry "box beds"; not holes in the wall, as in cities, but grand, big, airy beds, adorned with many-colored counterpanes, and hung with natty curtains, showing the skill of the mistress of the house.

The other end was my father's workshop, filled with five or six "stocking frames," whirring with the constant action of five or six pairs of busy hands and feet, and producing right genuine hosiery for the merchants at Hawick and Dumfries.

The "closet" was a very small apartment between the other two, having room only for a bed, a little table and a chair, with a diminutive window shedding diminutive light on the scene.

This was the Sanctuary of that cottage home. So daily, and several times a day, generally after each meal, we saw our father retire, and "shut to the door"; and we children got to understand by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing was too sacred to be talked about) that prayers were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place.

We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice pleading as if for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tiptoe, not to disturb the holy colloquy.

The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light as of a new-born smile that always was dawning on my father's face: it was a reflection from the Divine Presence, in the consciousness of which he lived.

Never, in temple or cathedral, on mountain or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and oaken wattles.

Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, or blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes of those cries to God, would hurl back all doubt with the victorious appeal, "He walked with God, why may not I?" (page 4-5)