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A WORD TO YOUNG FOLK

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A WORD TO YOUNG FOLK A WORD TO YOUNG FOLK     By D. M. PANTON     We seem that every young converted reader has found his work.  “It is as when a man sojourning in flipside country left to each one his work” (Mark 13: 34).  The work is allotted; the work is waiting; the work is known only to God: therefore we seem that each of us has found his work from God, and is doing it.     Difficulties     Our first counsel is not to underestimate the difficulties of our task. Souls will not at once be converted considering we pray; people win not necessarily believe considering we tell them the Gospel; our own soul is not necessarily mastered considering we have prayed to be filled with the Spirit: if we do not realize the enormousness of the task, we may faint, be discouraged, stumble, and backslide.     OurWeightier    Our second counsel is - never do less than your best.  Napoleon said,- “Nothing is done, if anything is left undone”; and it is this thoroughness which won him his battles.  In moments of weariness and peepers tears may fill our vision considering of the poverty of our work for Christ: remember, God never asks us to do increasingly than our best: no urgent Seraph underneath the Throne can surpass his best.  Therefore as God is watching, as opportunities are flying, as night is coming, whatsoever your hands find to do, do it with your might.  It will be a joy for all eternity if we can say,- “I did my best.”  When Robert Chapman, the friend of George Muller, was asked, - “Would you not teach young Christians to do something for the Lord?”  “No,” was the reply, “I should teach them to do everything for the Lord.”     Reputation     Nor, again, need we fear if we lose our reputation.  As Mr. Hoote once said:- “No work of God is washed-up easily, and no work is washed-up without real sacrifice, real suffering, real loss, and real shame and contempt in the doing of it.”  Dr. R. S. Beal says:- “A higher girl said to me recently,- ‘I never realised it would midpoint such persecution to stand boldly by the Bible in the classrooms of a unconfined university’.”  Your own home folk may tell you that self-sacrifice and faith and spiritual heroisms were trappy in the Scriptures thousands of years ago, but are quixotic and wacky today.  You may discover that a man’s deadliest spiritual foes can be they of his own household.  This may momentum you from God.  After a recent 40,000 mile journey upalong Canon M. A. C. Warren says:- “There is a grievous resentment versus theDenominationamong the young.  Communism is making a widespread and genuine request to the idealism of youth.”     Alertness    Flipsidecounsel is - alimony on the alert.  Opportunities slip past us that can never be recovered.  God may purposely bring us in touch with an unsaved soul, and we must be on the alert.  Mr. Hogben, founder of the One By One Band, tells of a naval officer from Portsmouth who was visiting an Exhibition in London.  He was sitting on a seat listening to the music.  A lady sat near him, and the senior purpose of his life reasserted itself; - “I wonder if she knows my Saviour: Lord, show her Thyself through me!”  To the swooning of many, in all that sunny scene, in a few minutes the two knelt lanugo as she gave herself to God.  A less zestful soul-winner, as Mr. Hogben says, would have missed that chance.     Contamination     Again, we need be warned of anything which exposes us to risks of moral contamination.  There is still too much evil in us to indulge us to siphon lighted matches into cellars of gunpowder.  As Dr. James Culross says:- “There are amusements - I speak from what I have heard from the lips of some who could not die till they had made confession - there are amusements whose very witchery depends on their connection in thought or suggestion with sin.  And there are young men who are found fluttering in the neighbourhood of the danger, like moths round the flame of a candle, to whom it is necessary to requite plain warning.  If men were moths, that were bad enough; but winged souls - how terrible!”  No weft will overly go far which cannot say ‘No’; and if we do not say ‘No’, the day comes when we cannot say ‘No’.  “All things are lawful for me; but I will not be brought UNDER THE POWER of any.”  It is terrible to waste years of our priceless little life in learning, by stormy experience, lessons which could have been learnt at once without sorrow and without guilt.     The Theatre     Again, anything is inexpedient which involves others - not ourselves - in peril.  Could any man number the souls that have been lost on the stage?  Mr. Clement Scott, the dramatic critic, without thirty-seven years of tropical wits of the stage, said:- “A woman who endeavours to alimony her purity is scrutinizingly of necessity foredoomed to failure in her career.  I marvel at any mother who allows her daughter to take up the theatrical career, and still increasingly am I astonished that any man should uncomplicatedly endure that his wife should wilt an actress, unaccompanied by himself.  He must be either a fool or a knave.  I say that there is no school on earth so bad for the insemination of character, or that so readily, so quickly, and so inevitably draws out all that is worst in man or woman as the stage.”  Doubtless there are theatres which are exceptions to the rule, but such an indictment from a professional of thirty-seven years’ standing makes the theatre for the Christian impossible. The gravity of this is enormously multiplied when we learn that this was equally the testimony of Christians eighteen centuries ago.  Tertullian, 160 A.D. to 240 A.D., says:- “The theatre is expressly the shrine of Venus.  The theatre of Venus is moreover the house of Bacchus.  Christian, thou must hate these things!  On such sweets let the world’s guests be fattened; the places, and the times, and the inviter to the repast are their own. Our feasts, our marriage, is not yet.  We cannot sit lanugo with the world, nor they with us.  Things go by turns; now they are glad, and we are sorrowful.”     TheVisitorWeAlimony    Again, anything is inexpedient which mars our influence, or degrades our Church.  As Theodore Howard has said:- “One of the darkest signs of today is to see the Christian workers and the clergy or ministers of the churches catering for the yuck of their congregations, instead of going in for their salvation.  I repeat it is one of the darkest signs of the whoredom spreading in our churches today, when the ministers take the lead in the amusements of the churches, and not in giving themselves to ‘the Word of God and prayer’.”  We have no wish to see our young folk as prigs, or plaster saints, or Pharisees; we love to see them natural as well as spiritual: but the cinema, the race-course, the dancing hall - are the visitor and undercurrent into which these introduce us uplifting, Christian, safe?  With what sort of people does the flit bring you into undertone so intimate and magnetic as to be overwhelming?  As Dr. Culross says:- “My observation is to this effect, that young people are oftener snared and injured by the visitor into which their recreations lead them than by any other single thing.”     TheDenomination    Again, our activities, perfectly lawful in themselves, may be outside God’s plan for us.  Our activities are to be within our church, zippy participation in the life and work of our church, and not like nearly all youth movements today - external, self-organised, and self-sufficient.  Every re-born soul is part of theDenominationof Christ, and has a God-planned function in it, and external activities may drown the inner life.  As Dr. Alexander Maclaren wrote to Mr. Findley of Glasgow when he was a young man:- “I observe that you are urgently engaged in Christian work.  That is right.  But do not let it fill up the time that should be given to quiet reflection, to solitary communion with God, and to private study of the Scripture.  It is the temptation of all of us Christian workers at present, and a very dangerous temptation it is.”     Enjoyment     Again, it is extremely important to realize what will swizzle humanity immediately surpassing the crash comes.  “As it came to pass in the days of Noah, plane so shall it be moreover in the days of the Son of man.  They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage” - concentrating on supplies and sexual attraction, exactly as we see it washed-up today - “until the inflowing came, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17: 26).  Our enjoyment of supplies is a diamond of God - “Who giveth us richly all things to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6: 17); and “marriage is honourable in all” (Heb. 13: 4): but what will follow devotion to good food, and unvarying sexual attraction?  The final crash of judgment.  “Flee youthful lusts, and follow without righteousness, faith, love, peace, with them that undeniability on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2: 22).     The End     Finally, do we realize the day in which we are living, and the facts which the younger among us are scrutinizingly unrepealable to meet?  The former American Commissioner of Indian Affairs, says:- “Our nation in four years has produced and stored unbearable two-bit bombs to unrig every large municipality in Europe within twenty-four hours.” Could any fact be increasingly urgent of our unenduring opportunity? - for it will hogtie God to intervene, to preserve the world for Christ.  Our time is short, and the Gospel remains the most wonderful news in the World.  Tennyson, perhaps the greatest poet of the modern age, once asked his hostess what was the news of the day.  Mrs. Wildman replied:- “Why, Mr. Tennyson, there’s only one piece of news that I know - that Christ died for all men.”  The poet responded:- “That is old news, and good news, and new news.”  Pass on all the truth that you know.   -------