Chapter 13
THE HEAVENLY VISION
In spite of the
stares of the wise, and the world's derision, Dare travel the
star-blazed road,dare follow the Vision.
The world is a vapor,
and only the Vision is real -- Yea, nothing can hold against hell but
the Winged Ideal. -- Edwin Markham
We are in a world
where the whole course of things tends to secularize and degrade
whatever is angelic in the soul. Aspiration is depressed, judgment is
warped, conscience is
drugged, faith is one, and hope is slain by the incessant grind of
earthliness.
Whatever tends to
stimulate the moral nature and bring men into higher condition than
belong to their ordinary experience is a preparation for seeing
invisible things as really and
clearly as if they were visible. These visions -- for such they are --
come in innumerable ways:
sometimes by a flash of truth upon the aroused intellect, sometimes
through the quickened
affections, sometimes through the awakened moral sentiments, sometimes
through the excited
imagination. A thousand things and occasions can play upon the corded
soul and lift it above itself,
till sordid cares are forgotten, and the burdens that have depressed
the spirit are thrown off, and
the Son of God breaks the chains of Satan that have bound him. He then
stands and looks for a brief
space with clear eye upon spiritual and eternal things. Clouds
disappear, mists vanish, the glamour
of unrealities is dispelled, and for one moment he sees as in the light
of God.
How blessed a thing it
is that there is in the nature of man that out of which may come these
heavenly visions! How gracious that God kindly uses this possibility
for moral ends, and arrest at
times the attention of the soul and fixes it upon eternal things! Peter
had such a vision when God
would take narrow bigotry out of his heart and teach him the sublime
truth of the common
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
Little Samuel had such
a vision when God would make the child acquainted with himself,
and cause him to be the mouthpiece of Jehovah to a guilty house and a
fallen people. It was
Samuel's call and induction into office as the prophet and reformer of
Israel.
Gideon had such a
heavenly vision when God would lead him out of obscurity and timidly
and fearfulness of heart, and clothe him with power for leadership and
deeds of daring.
Saul, the mad bigot,
breathing out threatening and slaughter, hating Jesus and His followers,
in spite of manifold evidence of Christ's divinity and the innocence of
His disciples -- this excited,
half-insane fanatic received a sudden vision of the glory and divinity
of Jesus, and the wickedness
of his persecutions, and the awful folly of vision smote him and made
him fall before the pierced
feet. He bowed his will in submission, and his life was forever
changed. John, imprisoned on a
barren and desolate isle for Christ's sake, filled with sorrow over
what seemed the impending
doom of the kingdom of God, receive a comforting vision of the Son of
Man's reigning in supernal
glory, overcoming the prince of darkness, and setting up His eternal
kingdom of light and love. The
aged apostle gathered hope, and sent his comforting message and loving
warning to the churches to
prepare them to resist the onsweeping persecution of the pagan emperor.
Such were
visions, and such their varied purposes in other days. God for similar
ends is
sending them yet. Some illustrations of the working of God's Spirit and
providences will throw
light upon this subject.
A college
student in England had neglected his studies, rioting at night with
dissipated
companions, and sleeping in the classroom when he ought to have been
listening. A fellow student
came into his room one morning before he had risen from his pillow and
solemnly said to him in
the name of Jesus: "Paley, you are a fool! You are wasting your
opportunities. Do not throw away
your life. I have no talent, but you can make of yourself what you
will." Years afterward Paley
wrote: "I was so struck with what he said that I lay in bed until I had
formed my plan for life. I
ordered my fire to be always laid at night. I arose at five o'clock in
the morning, and read steadily
all day. I allotted to each portion of the day its proper branch of
study, and became Senior
Wrangler." What an hour that was when God sent to that young man a
vision of his possible
greatness and impending ruin! A resolution was formed that converted a
wrecked and dissipated
young man into a consecrated scholar and one of the most stalwart
defenders of Christianity, till all
time and all eternity will be debtor to his influence.
Sometimes souls
are aroused by special providences to hear the voice of God and change
their destiny. Such was the case with both Lord Clive and Garfield.
Lord Clive, the founder of
England's great Indian empire, landed in India a wild, reckless youth
with a purse empty and a
character lost by dissipation. Weary of life, which was a disgrace to
his friends and a burden to
himself, loading a pistol and putting the muzzle to his head, he drew
but only to flash the powder in
the pan. Renewing the priming once more he put his finger on the
trigger and the muzzle to his
brow, and was about to draw when, impressed by his remarkable escapes,
he laid the pistol down,
saying, godless and graceless man as he was, "Surely God intends to do
some great things by me
that He has so preserved me!" Thus the failure of the deadly weapon to
take his life was the voice
of God to his soul, and made him the founder of a Christian empire.
So with
Garfield. The reading of a bad book fired his youthful mind to leave
the society of
his prayerful mother and have a sensational career at sea. He went to a
vessel on Lake Erie to seek
service as a sailor. The captain cursed him and the sailors jeered at
him so brutally that he was
abashed. He then thought to begin lower down by service on a
canal-boat. He fell or was knocked
into the fourteen times the first trip, and he could not swim. One
night in some way, while he was
handling the rope, it caught in the crevice of the boat by kinking and
then slipped suddenly and
threw him into the dark waters where none could see him but God. He
caught the slack rope as he
sank, when it suddenly straightened and, climbing hand over hand, he
regained the vessel. Another
kink in the rope had caught in the crevice and saved him. Drenched as
he was, he sat down in the
darkness to think. He threw the rope into the crevice six hundred times
and it would not kink again.
He said to himself: "I might throw this rope ten times as many times
without its kinking, so there
were six thousand chances against my life. Against such odds Providence
alone could have saved
me. God therefore thinks my life is worth saving, and if that's so I
will not throw it away on a
canal-boat. I'll go home, get an education, and become a man." Thus
again a striking Providence
aroused a reckless youth to a sense of his worth, by which a Christian
statesman was saved to the
world.
Oh, these
experiences that heaven's messages into the soul these VISIONS that
lifts the
curtain of destiny and turn wandering and tardy feet into the path of
divine appointment! How
gracious they are! What benedictions from heaven!
And they come to
Christians also as a kindly call to a higher and fuller life. It was the
prayers of two holy women, pleading for Moody's anointing with the Holy
Spirit for special
service that brought him his heart-hunger for God, his vision, and all
that he afterward became. It
was in the gray dismal morning in London that the holy Mr. Studd came
to and F. B. Meyer's room
and moved him to welcome the Holy Ghost in all His blessed fullness
into his heart. Dr. Wilbur
Chapman says: "I had had visions of this power of the Holy Spirit, and
glimpses of what I might be
if I were 'filled with the Spirit,' but all this time, as it was with
the disciples at Ephesus, was a
great lacking." At last by reading a tract received a vision of how to
receive the blessing and he
bowed and entered in.
The prophet
Isaiah had a vision of the holy God and a holy heaven, and was
convicted for
HOLINESS, and received the blessing. It is the hour of all hours to a
believer when this vision and
call to holiness comes. The late Professor Drummond says: "The
departure of the soul from God
begins when the believer rejects the tender of holiness. He thus turns
away from God to face the
perils of moral deterioration and death. It means moral suicide and
ante-mortem damnation."
Mr. L____ stood
high in the church of which a friend of mine was pastor -- a preacher of
full salvation. A revival wave of the holiness kind struck that church,
and it brought to Brother
L---- the vision of a clean heart. But he held off and advocated the
growth theory. He stood for a
time face to face with God, and the issue consciously rejected
sanctification. He soon began to
neglect the house of God. The family altar went down. Zeal for the
church wanted. Another revival
came, in which his own children were converted, but he dodged it. The
faithful pastor urged upon
him present holiness as the only reliable thing in the midst of life's
uncertain. But he refused all
pleadings and persuasions, holding out against the call of God. A few
weeks later he fell from a
tree and was killed instantly.
A minister of
unusual gifts and power had a humble brother in his church who was
blessedly sanctified. The minister, like the prophet Isaiah, got
convicted for a clean heart. He took
the humble brother in his carriage out to a grove and asked him to pray
for him. But he was not
quite willing to pay the price for the unspeakable gift; he felt that
the consecration required was
too much. The heavenly vision had come, and sanctification was
rejected. In the course of time this
talented minister lost his power and his sweetness, became bitter and
full of the spirit of
persecution against holiness. He turned that humble brother out of the
church, and hated the cause
he represented. Now that minister is a backslidden wanderer in a
distant state; while the humble,
sanctified brother has become an evangelist known from ocean to ocean
Oh, this vision
-- this call to holiness -- it is the touch of God and the breath of
heaven to
the soul! If any reader of these lines has seen the truth, has felt the
call, I beseech you, be not
disobedient to the heavenly vision." "He that despiseth, despiseth not
man but God, who hath also
given unto us his holy Spirit." It is an awful, a fatal thing to quench
the Spirit of God.
THE END
