`And straightway the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief.’ Mark 9: 24.

When Jesus spoke to the disciples about the mothers who were coming with their little children to Him, His word was, Suffer the children to come, and forbid them not. In this story He uses a stronger word. When the father of the lunatic had told Him that the disciples had not been able to cast out the evil spirit, and Jesus had reproved their unbelief, He spoke, Bring the child to me. The expression is a stronger one, still setting forth the same truth. The little ones were quite ready and willing to come to the loving Stranger to be blessed. This poor child, at times all unconscious or rebellious, had to be brought, whether he knew it or not. There can be no evil spirit in a child so strong, no resistance so desperate, but the parent has the liberty and the power to bring him to Jesus. To every disciple, to every father and mother, in every extremity of sin or need, Christ’s voice is heard calling, Bring the child to me.

And then, if we want to understand what it is really to bring a child, on whom Satan has a hold, to Jesus, we have this most wondrously set forth in the further communication of this father with Jesus. When, in answer to Christ’s question, he had told the touching story of how ever since his childhood the boy had been the prey of this terrible trouble, and had pleadingly added, `If Thou canst do anything, have compassion on us and help us,’ Jesus threw all the responsibility of the issue of the case upon the father, and said, `If thou canst! all things are possible to him that believeth.’ It was not the question whether Jesus could and would do it, but whether the father could believe. If he did, the healing was sure; if he did not, it could not take place.

`If thou canst! all things are possible to him that believeth.’ These words are one of the well known expressions in which all the blessings of God’s mighty saving love are put at the disposal of faith. `By faith we understand, both what God has done and will do. By faith we see Him who is invisible, in the reality of His almighty power and His love towards ourselves. By faith we receive His word into our very heart as a quickening power, that works in us the very thought and sentiment that was in His heart when He spake it. By faith our heart; our nature, our life is opened up to give place to God, so as to let Him be and do in us what He pleases. By faith we become fully conscious of what the purpose of His will is, and of Himself as waiting to work it in us. By faith we forsake the visible, ourselves, with our own thoughts and strength; we look to God to do what He has promised, and so give Him the glory. Faith is the exercise of a will that yields itself for God’s holy will to take possession of it and work out its pleasure. `All things are possible to him that believeth,’ because `with God nothing shall be impossible,’ and faith is union with God.

In speaking these words to the father of the lunatic, Jesus gave to us for all time the secret of successful parental training and prayer. He tells us that it is not only the ministers of His gospel, the watchmen, and the workers in fields of special danger or difficulty, but every Christian parent, that needs to exercise strong faith, and in strong faith may most assuredly secure the salvation of his child. It teaches us that His compassion and power are longing to help us, if we can believe. If not, it is our blame if our children perish.

There are parents who think this is a hard saying. They seek the cause of unconverted and unsaved children in God and not in themselves. Has God’s sovereignty nothing to do with the salvation of our children? Is there not such a thing as election? And if so, how can all the responsibility be thrown on our unbelief? Scripture reveals to us most clearly God’s sovereignty; His grace is electing grace; the final decision of the destiny of each man is in His hands. Scripture reveals as clearly man’s responsibility, and the all-prevailing power of faith. True humility accepts both statements without reconciling them; it bows under the solemn truth Jesus utters here, that if the parent can believe the child can be saved.

How this truth ought to affect us, our text tells us. With tears the father cried, `Lord, I believe! help mine unbelief.’ In the agony of the thought that his unbelief may keep the blessing from his child, in the consciousness of how strong unbelief is still in himself, he bursts into tears, and casts himself to confess at Jesus’ feet that unbelief, and ask deliverance from it. It is amid these tears of penitence and confession that the faith is exercised to which the victory is given. The devil is east out, and the child is saved. Christ’s blessed and most heart-searching word had done its work; it had revealed the unbelief, but also wakened the faith that brought the blessing.

Christ’s word must do the same with every parent, with every father, who pleads for a child’s liberation from Satan’s power. A father’s tears have power. There must be confession and humbling wherever there is to be strong faith. There must be the conviction and confession of the sin of unbelief: that it has been the cause of the blessing being withheld, and that we are verily guilty in being unbelieving. When the disciples asked the Master why they could not cast out this devil, He told them it was because of their unbelief, and that this unbelief was caused by their life not being one of prayer and fasting. Unbelief is not, as many think, a weakness, inexplicable and beyond our power. Unbelief has its reasons: it is the indication of the state of heart. The world, the worldly man, cannot believe. The self-righteous, the proud man, cannot believe. It is only the pure in heart, the humble, the soul that thirsts for God, and forsakes all to follow Christ, that can be strong in faith. And therefore the first step in the path of an overcoming faith is the confession of its sinfulness, and the sins of which it is the index and the symptom.

I have heard parents plead very earnestly with God for the conversion of their grown-up children, when I secretly feared that they could not be heard. I saw no sign of confession of parental sin. There are parents whose worldliness, whose lack of living faith, whose “self-indulgence and neglect in the education of their children, have simply sown the seeds of which they are now reaping the fruit in the departure of their children from God; and yet they wonder why their children are not more religious. They sometimes pray earnestly for them, and try to have the faith, perhaps think they have it, that their children will be saved. They may be deceiving themselves. True faith sanctifies. It searches the heart. It confesses the sin of unbelief, and all the sin in which that has its root and strength. It casts itself weeping and helpless at the feet of Jesus. There, and there alone, bowing in its weakness, resting on his strength, it obtains the blessing He loves to bestow.

Fathers, who have sons you would fain bring to Jesus to be saved, come and hear the lessons the Lord would teach you. Let these children first bring you to Jesus in confession, and prayer, and trust; your faith can then bring them in truth. And in yourself and in them you will experience what the all-prevailing power and truth is of the word: ‘If thou canst! all things are possible to him that believeth.’

Blessed Son of God! look in mercy upon a parent who now comes to You with a child still unconverted and under the power of the Evil One. O Lord Jesus! have compassion on us and help us! Let the child be delivered from Satan’s power; oh, make Him a child of God.

Lord! I have heard Your voice — `If thou canst believe!’ and it has filled my heart with trembling. I have to confess how little my life has been a life of faith, and how my unbelief has hindered the blessing from my child. I have to confess the worldliness and selfishness, the want of entire surrender and obedience to You, which made a strong faith impossible. I bow in shame at the thought of all the unbelief that even now comes up in me. Lord, I do believe! help my unbelief.

I do believe, Lord, in Your mighty power. I do believe in Your infinite Love. I do believe in You as my Savior, my Friend, my Covenant Redeemer. I do believe, my Lord, that You hear me now for this child. Lord, I believe! help my unbelief. I look to Your word, and hold it fast. I yield myself to a life of entire surrender to You, to be Yours alone. Blessed Lord Jesus, I do believe! You hear and save my child. In this faith I praise Your holy name. Amen.

`He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb.’ Luke 1: 15.

May God grant us His grace, to meditate in holy tenderness and reverence on the truth revealed to us here, a truth of unspeakable preciousness and power to a believing parent: the mother’s womb the work-place of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord has taught us that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist; if he could be filled with the Holy Spirit from before his birth, how much more, now that Christ is glorified and the Holy Spirit given, the child of those who have become partakers of the full redemption, and the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ.

We find here, at the very opening of the New Testament history, the same truth that came out so strongly in the laying of the foundations of the covenant with the patriarchs. In preparing and securing servants to do His work, God loves to begin at the very beginning, and from before the birth, from the very first conception of life, to take charge and to sanctify the vessel He is to use for His service. The more distinctly we apprehend this part of God’s plan with His Church as one of the root principles of the economy of redemption, the better shall we understand the holy privilege and duty of parentage. Very specially will mothers be encouraged and strengthened in faith to yield themselves, with all the hopes and joys of motherhood, to be God’s chosen vessels for the fulfilment of His purpose and the perfecting of His Church.

Let us look first at what Scripture teaches us of the mother in whom the Holy Spirit is thus to work. Of John’s parents it is testified: `They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.’ It is the God of nature, who in this world of cause and effect has ordered that like begets like, who is also the God of grace. With omnipotence at His command, ready to work any miracles He pleases, He yet most carefully observes His own laws, and when He wants a holy child, seeks for holy parents. Throughout Scripture, specially in the New Testament, the blessed indwelling and inworking of the Holy Spirit is promised to the obedient. Man must, in obedience to Divine command, and under the preparatory moving of the Spirit, build the house; then does the Holy Spirit as the glory and the presence of the Lord take possession and fill it. And so it was of parents, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless,that he would be born who was to be filled with the Holy Ghost from his mother’s womb, and the forerunner of Him who should baptize with the Holy Ghost. It is of holy parents that God would take a holy child.

The double lesson for every parent, and especially for every mother, is of the deepest interest. A righteous and blameless life prepares for, and may also count upon the power of the Holy Ghost in the unborn child. Let expectant mothers, who would fulfil their holy calling as the ministers of their Lord’s purposes, study Elizabeth’s character: `righteous, and walking in all the commandmentsof the Lord blameless.’ Itis to such a life that God chose us, `that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.’ It is to such a life Jesus redeemed us: `He hath reconciled you in His body through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight.’ It is no more than what every child of God ought to be and can be, `blameless and harmless, without blemish in the midst of a perverse generation.’ But it is specially what every mother should be, who would offer her body as the temple of the Holy Ghost, that in her the very first beginnings of life may be over-shadowed by the Holy Ghost. Oh, that mothers, and fathers too, understood to what a terrible degree the spirit of the world and the flesh, a life in which blamelessness before God is never expected or sought after, in which sin and selfishness are allowed to have rule, hinder the influence of the Spirit, and entail upon the child, more than is needed, the heritage of unholy appetite and passion. Let them believe that a life which, in deep humility and the faith of Jesus as our sanctification, seeks to walk in obedience and righteousness, blameless before the Lord, will be accepted and honored of Him. Let them believe that they have a right to ask, and most confidently to expect, the Spirit that is in them to take possession of the life God gives through them. Let them cherish this as the highest and the brightest hope of a holy motherhood: `He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb.’

Let us now look at what the angel’s message teaches us of the child thus conceived and born: `Thou shalt have joy and gladness, and many shall rejoice at his birth, for he shall be great in the sight of the Lord,’ — three marks of a child born under the covering of the Holy Spirit. The parents are to have joy and gladness. Alas! how many a Christian parent has had reason to say in bitter agony, Would God my child had never been born! Would you have divinely given and divinely secured joy and gladness in the children that are given you? Oh, let the Holy Spirit take possession of them from before their birth. Yours will be the holy joy of heaven in them, as you see the beauty of the Lord upon them, a joy that none can take away.

`And many shall rejoice at his birth.’ Alas! how many children of Christian parents have been the curse of their fellow-men! Would you have your child blessed and made a blessing, with many to thank God that ever they knew him or that he was born? Study the story of John’s birth. Study it in connection with the story of Jesus’ birth. It was for Jesus’ sake, in the power of the Son of God coming in the flesh, in virtue of his connection with Jesus, that John was thus filled with the Holy Ghost from his mother’s womb. Plead the coming, and the birth, and the redemption of Jesus on behalf of your child; claim the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh, and the promise of the Spirit to you and your children, and your faith will be strengthened to perfect confidence that your child too may in his measure be filled with the Spirit, and shall make many to rejoice at his birth.

`And he shall be great in the sight of the Lord.’ This sets the crown on the whole. A joy to his parents, a blessing to his fellow-men, and great in the sight of the Lord, is the Spirit-born child. Among men he may not make a name, in gifts and talents he may not be great, but great he will be in the sight of Him who sees not as man sees. He will be a vessel God can use for His work, a true way-preparer for the coming of the Lord in His kingdom.

Mother! God gives you this picture of Elizabeth and her child of promise, with the double lesson: live as she did; believe and receive what she did. Young mother, your motherhood is in God’s sight a holier and a more blessed thing than you know. If you are indeed God’s child, you have in everything been placed under the leading and the rule of His Holy Spirit. Be sure that all the tender interest and solemn thought, all the quiet trust and joyful hope, which expectant motherhood calls forth, may be sanctified and refined by God’s Holy Spirit, and you be united with your little one under the overshadowing of His heavenly grace.

Ever blessed God! once more You have shown me Your way in preparing a seed to serve You, and what a deep interest You have in securing a holy and blameless motherhood. I have seen You training a mother for Your service. You do fill her heart with the thought of the Divine destiny of her child. You do stir her faith to the confident expectation of Your Divine Spirit and blessing on her seed. You do call her in righteousness and blamelessness of life to her holy work. You do in all things teach her that the life she is to bring forth is a holy gift from You, to be received and borne in a pure and holy vessel.

O great and glorious God! in deep humility and trembling Your handmaid bows before You, to offer herself to Your service. O my Father! who do much more surely than fathers on earth give good gifts to their children, give Your Holy Spirit to Your children, to make even their body Your temple, fulfil Your wondrous promise to Your child. Let Your Holy Spirit dwell in me. If it please You to make me the mother of a child, oh, let him be filled with the Spirit from the womb. Let me be filled with the Spirit. And let my child be born only for this one thing, that he may be great in Your sight, and a blessing to all around him. Amen.

`And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’ Luke 1: 33.

We have often had occasion to notice the wonderful oneness of mother and child, and to what extent the former, in her life and character, influences and decides what the child is to be. The life she imparts is her own life, in the deepest meaning of the term. When God gave His Son to be born of a woman, this law was not violated, and the mother He chose for His Son was doubtless all that grace could make her to be the fit vessel through whom He should receive His human nature and disposition.

And so, just as Jesus Himself is in everything our example, so we may naturally expect that in His mother God has given us one of His servants who may be an example to our mothers. If the child Jesus be an example to our children, there will be something for mothers to learn from His mother. She to whom the heavenly messenger said, ‘Hail! thou highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women;’ and to whom Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Ghost, also said, `Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, and blessed is she that believed,’ will surely in her words and ways have left an example for every mother who yields herself like Mary to the Lord, to bear a child that can be called a son of the Most High. Were there more mothers like Mary — this we may confidently say, without forgetting the infinite distance between her child and ours — there would be more children like the holy Child Jesus.

And what, looked at from the human side, constitutes the most marked feature of Mary’s motherhood? It is the childlike simplicity of faith in which she surrenders herself to the Divine purpose: `Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’ She calls herself the Lord’s slave or bondwoman; she gives her will, herself, up to Him, to do what pleases Him; in quiet trust and expectancy she will look to Him to do what He has said. It is the same spirit of obedient faith which had once fitted Abraham to be the father of the promised seed, which now prepares her to become the mother of Him in whom the promise is to be fulfilled. Not that there were no difficulties or questionings. We read, `She was greatly troubled at the saying of the angel, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.’ When again he had spoken, she feared not to ask, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’ But when once the angel had spoken to her of the power of the Most High overshadowing her, she yielded herself to the Divine word. And she became an example to every mother who would like her share the benediction, ‘Blessed is she that believeth, for there shall be a fulfilment of the things which have been spoken to her from the Lord.’ It is the surrender of faith that makes a blessed motherhood: ‘Blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.’

`Behold the bondmaid of the Lord.’ Mary teaches a mother to yield herself to God for the service of His kingdom, that in her His purpose and glory may be made manifest. It was not by the birth of Mary’s son alone that God’s kingdom was to come. Believing parents may look upon their children as the stones of the great temple of which Jesus was the cornerstone. Not less than with the birth of Isaac, and every child of the chosen race down to Christ, is the birth of each of our children under God’s guardianship a link in the golden chain of the good pleasure of God’s will. Over all the impulses of human love and the instincts of a God given maternity, there hovers a Divine purpose using them for the carrying out of His plan. And nothing will do more to sanctify the life of the wife and the mother than when she realizes herself to be the Lord’s bondwoman, redeemed for this too, that from her the chosen seed may be multiplied, that from her may be born a generation to serve the Lord. Human love will receive a Divine consecration; what otherwise appears to be only nature and earthly is elevated into the heavenlies, the region of God’s will and God’s favor; the expectant mother knows herself to be like the angels, one of His servants, doing His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word.

`Be it unto me according to Thy word.’ Such is the faith that gives the strength to surrender oneself to God’s service. It looks no longer at difficulties or impossibilities; it counts upon God to carry out His purpose, and to give the grace and the strength for the work to which He has called us. And it is just this faith that above everything fits for the blessed duties of motherhood, that gives that quiet rest of body and spirit which to mother and babe is health and strength. Or what mother is there who, as she first becomes conscious of her new vocation, is not at times with Mary `greatly troubled,’ and does not feel the question come many a time, `How can all this be?’ She finds no rest so sure or sweet as to cast her troubles on her Lord — let Him do what seems to Him good. If the God of nature has created her for a calling, and the God of grace has redeemed her to fulfil that calling in the interests of His kingdom, she assuredly may trust His power and love not to forsake her in her hour of need. `What hour I am afraid I will trust in Thee; in God have I put my trust, I will not be afraid:’ such words have a thousand times over been the stay of the trembling but trusting handmaid of the Lord.

`Be it according to Thy word:’ to understand fully the teaching of Mary’s example here, there is one trait of her character we must not omit to notice. Twice it is said of her, Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ It is in the holy quiet of meditation and reflection on what God has said that the spirit of trust is cultivated. It is only as God’s words are kept and pondered in the heart that they can quicken and deepen a living faith in Him who spoke them. Every mother who searches Holy Scripture will find there many a saying of God with reference to her sacred calling, which, if truly drunk in, will fill the heart with confidence and joy. They will teach her to regard everything connected with the birth of the child as a matter of deepest interest to the Father in heaven, and of great importance to His kingdom, as the ushering in of a new member into its number. She will see how all the exceeding great and precious promises may be claimed by her for the little one, before ever yet it has seen the light. She will see how her receiving the little one in the name of Jesus has the promise of Jesus’ presence for herself and for it. She will find that all the ordering and training of the child has been provided for in regulations of Divine wisdom and love, and that all the grace needed for carrying out these orders is most surely given to each one who, like Mary, will but be a bondmaid of the Lord, and will believe what He has spoken. All of care and fear, of danger and pain in the life of motherhood, all the help and joy and rich reward God has connected with it — all is written in the Book of the Lord; the mother who listens, and waits, and believes, will, in view both of what she fears and what she hopes, be able to say, `Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word.’ As she bides her time, let quiet retirement, in which she not only hides herself from the world but opens her whole being to the rays of heaven, let thoughtful, trustful pondering of God’s words engage the heart, she will find how true the word is, `Blessed is she that believed.’

What a holy and what a blessed thing the birth of a child becomes in the light of the birth of Jesus! What a holy and what a blessed task that of the mother becomes in the light of the favor of the Most High God, as the means of the fulfilment of His purpose, the promotion of His glory, the experience of His special grace and mercy! As the mother ponders these things, she will understand something of the deep meaning of that word of Paul, `She shall be saved through the childbearing, if they continue in faith, and love, and sanctification, with sobriety.’ Just as labor in the sweat of his brow was given to man, to be in his fallen state one of his greatest blessings, so the labor of childbearing to the woman, that through it and its blessed discipline the salvation of Christ might the more effectually be inwrought into her whole character and disposition. It calls and helps to a continuance in that blessed life of faith and trustful dependence, of love and gentleness and motherly kindness, of holiness in the indwelling and sanctification of the Spirit, of sobriety and self-restraint and temperance, in which true blessedness is found. It helps, to them who are rightly exercised thereby, to form that perfect womanly character which is one of God’s most beautiful gifts on earth. It is in this path of loving acceptance of God’s appointment, and trustful resting in His promise, that the word will come true, as a greeting to each expectant mother: `Blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.’

Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Yes, Lord! as You have already looked upon her in Your mercy, and set her apart for the sacred work of bearing and bringing up a seed for You, still continue to look upon her to give her all that she needs, and to work in her all that is well pleasing in Your sight. As the eye of a maid unto the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look unto the Lord our God, until He have mercy upon us. Grant to Your child an ever increasing clearness, the blessed assurance that in this holy calling of motherhood she is indeed Your handmaiden, called to the fulfilment of Your purposes, set apart for the service of Your kingdom. Let this thought teach me to look upon everything connected with the birth of my child as of deepest interest to my Father. Let it encourage me to cast every fear and burden, every care and pain, on Him in whose service they come. Let it sanctify all the hope and joy with which You do so wonderfully sweeten the sorrow with which sin had filled our cup.

And so let it be unto me according to Your word. In childlike faith, O my Lord, I would take Your blessed Word, with all its teachings and its promises, as my light and strength. In the time of patient waiting, or in the hour of anguish, Your Word shall be my stay. Let Your Holy Spirit unfold to Your handmaiden what treasures Your Word contains for her as mother, that she may know at the right time to receive what You have provided for her. May she so be prepared that the child which has been received according to Your word may be trained according to that Word, and enter into the full enjoyment of all that Your Word holds out in promise to the seed of Your people. Behold the handmaid of the Lord! be it unto me according to Your word. Amen.

`And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden.’ Luke 1: 46-48.

There is perhaps no such moment of exquisite joy, of deep, unutterable thanksgiving taking the place of pain and sorrow, as when a mother knows herself to be the living mother of a living child. Our blessed Lord used it as the fittest type of that wondrous surprise, that strange resurrection joy, with which His disciples should find Him whom they mourned as crucified and dead to be the Living One. `A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come, but as soon as she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.’ A mother will find no more fitting expression for her joy than in thanksgiving to Him to whom she owes so much. And for the expression of that thanksgiving she will find in many portions of Holy Scripture the most suitable language. How often, for instance, has the mother almost instinctively asked for the words of Psalm 103: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and with tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.’ But as the simple summary of all a mother has to say, no words will be found more beautiful than these of the mother of our Lord: `My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior. For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden.’

In His holy providence the Father has so ordered it that the first week after the birth of the little one is a time of weakness, in which nothing is so much needed as quiet and rest for the restoration of nature’s exhausted powers. The arrangement is one of wondrous grace, giving the mother time to prepare herself again for the new duties devolving on her. While household duties and ordinary relation are kept at comparative distance, the Lord would keep His child for a little while in the secret place of His Holy Presence, to encourage and instruct her for the solemn responsibilities now again awaiting her. And there is nothing that will be more pleasing to her Lord, and more refreshing and strengthening for her own life, and a fitter preparation for blessing to the little one, than that the spirit of thanksgiving should give its bright tone to all her thoughts and hopes, and the song of praise, from the lips of the model mother, be repeated day by day, and from hour to hour: ` My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior. For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For He that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is His name; and His mercy is on them that fear Him, from generation to generation.’

It is hardly necessary to remind a mother of what all there is to stir her to praise. She has but to think of the anxious thoughts and fears that would sometimes come up as the solemn hour of her trial rose up before her, and her song is, `I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.’ She looks at the precious little treasure that has been given her, with all the love and joy it brings into heart and home; and the words come spontaneously, `What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits toward me?’ She sees in the little one, as she looks upon it in the light of God’s purpose and promise, an immortal being, fitted for showing forth God’s glory on earth, and sharing that glory in heaven, as a jewel in Jesus’ crown; and her soul bows in trembling wonder at the thought that the charge of keeping and forming such a treasure should be committed to one so feeble. She remembers that, though the little one has inherited from her an evil nature, yet through her too it has the promise of the covenant and the earnest of the Spirit: her child is holy, because she is one of God’s holy ones in Christ. She thinks of all the grace and wisdom and strength provided her in Christ to secure to her and her child all that God’s love had prepared; and as she listens to the voice, `My grace is sufficient for thee: my strength is made perfect in weakness,’ she can only sing again, ‘My soul doth magnify the lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior; His mercy is on them that fear Him, from generation to generation.’ It is not only God’s mercies, but God Himself, in whose love they have their value and their continuance; it is God himself in whom Mary, in whom the believer, in whom the grateful mother, is glad and rejoices. True praise uses God’s mercies only as the steps of the ladder along which it rises to leave them behind and rejoice in God alone.

This spirit of thanksgiving, in which, not content with the blessings alone, we rise up to the God who gave them, and rejoice in Him, is of greater worth than can well be expressed. It elevates and sanctifies both the joy, the gift that causes it, and the glad possessor, because it lifts all out of the sphere of nature into the fellowship of the spiritual and the Divine. And in this way it is the true preparation for all the work the mother has before her. We saw in Mary’s surrender of herself to her God, that He might fulfil in her the good pleasure of His will, how there were combined in it two elements, the surrender to the work she had to perform, `Behold the bondmaid of the Lord,’ and the trust that counted on God to do for her what He had promised, `Be it according to Thy word.’ In both of these aspects the thanksgiving and joy of the hour of deliverance, if cultivated and kept up, will be guidance and strength.

`Behold the bondmaid of the Lord.’ The labor of bearing a child is but the beginning of that labor of love to which God has appointed and set apart the mother. The whole work of rearing and guarding and training the child is now to follow. The spirit of thanksgiving is the best preparation for the altar of consecration. If the mother is indeed to receive grace for the right and successful fulfilment of this new charge, it will need on her part a very distinct consciousness and confession of unfitness, a very definite giving up of herself to be henceforth the Lord’s willing, loving slave for this holy work. As she looks at how much there may be that has to be parted with and put away, how much that she will have to struggle against and overcome, to be the holy mother of a holy child, entirely consecrated to God, the thought may conic up that the sacrifice and the strain will be too great, that it is impossible to live so strictly, so entirely and peculiarly given up to God’s service. We fear to be too different from others; God could bless us and our children even though we are not so very holy. Oh, that a mother, if such thoughts come up, would just pause and think of what God has done! There is the new life given to herself, and the life of her precious little one, there is the love and mercy of God, and all the promise of more love and mercy to be poured out — has the thanksgiving been so unreal, has the joy been so selfish and earthly, that there can be any hesitation as to whom these lives shall belong to? God forbid! if the thanksgiving has been true, it cannot but lead the mother to say that utterly and entirely she will live for God, that she may have grace to train a child who, too, shall utterly and entirely be the Lord’s. `The joy of the Lord is your strength;’ a mother’s joy is the power for a mother’s work; the spirit of thanksgiving leads to the altar of consecration where mother and child are laid as living sacrifices to be the Lord’s alone.

`Be it unto me according to Thy word:’ this word of faith and trust, looking to God to do all that He has promised, gets new meaning after the experience of the first part of its fulfilment. In all the work that waits the mother in the future, the goodness just experienced teaches her to trust. Let her but yield herself heartily, not to her work, but to her God for His work; she may depend upon it that His teaching and His help and His strength are realities. Let her in the joyful spirit of praise take His word, and, as she studies what it says of a mother on earth, note what it says of the Father in heaven and the abounding grace He has undertaken to supply, and her faith will grow strong that her vow of surrender has been accepted, that its fulfilment is possible and certain, and that the joy of a child born into the world is but the beginning of a joy that shall know no ending. Let thanksgiving lift the heart to God in praise; there faith becomes easy. Let faith lift the heart to God too; there thanksgiving becomes natural, and the life of mother and child may become one unceasing song of faith and love, of surrender and obedience, of thanksgiving and praise.

Blessed be the Lord! for He has showed me His marvelous kindness! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits! What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits toward me?

O my Father! in this the time of her weakness and gladness of heart, Your handmaid draws near to praise Your mercy and Your love. Here am I and this precious child You have given me, the witnesses of Your power and Your goodness; may our lives, all our days devoted to You, be the sacrifice of thanksgiving we bring You.

Oh, hear the prayer of Your handmaid, and let my life, now received anew as from Your hand, indeed become wholly new. In daily relation with my Father, in close following and fellowship with my Lord Jesus, in a very tender yielding to the leading and sanctifying of the Holy Spirit, I desire henceforth to live only and wholly as Your handmaid.

And with myself, Lord, I offer You my precious child. Let the grace I have implored of You fit me from its very birth to hold it as Your property, a sacred trust from You to nurse and train as Yours. It comes from You, O my God, a gift to me; accept it from me again, a living gift to You. Come to Your handmaid, I pray You, in this her time of weakness and thanksgiving: let in this time of holy quiet Your presence overshadow me, and give me the assurance that my prayer is heard; that You have accepted her and her little one to keep as Your own forevermore. Amen.

`And they brought Him to Jerusalem, to present Him to the Lord, as it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord, and to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord.’ Luke 2: 22-24.

According to the law of God in Israel, a child was circumcised when eight days old; this was done in its home. On the fortieth day the mother was to appear in the temple to bring the sacrifice of her purification, and to present her child to the Lord. If the child was a firstborn, then its presentation had special reference to the firstborn belonging to the Lord, and it had to be redeemed. The Child Jesus had thus also to be presented to the Lord, as being made under the law, and made like unto His brethren in all things. Made like in all things, not only that He might have experience of everything we pass through, but that we might know that every state and condition has been sanctified by His Holy Presence and merit, and that He now, by giving us the spirit which was in Him when passing through them, might impart to us the blessing and the sanctifying grace that flow from fellowship with Him. This truth has thoughts of wonderful joy and comfort for parents as they bring their little ones to God’s home, to present them before the Lord in baptism.

Let us study this presentation of the holy Child Jesus. There He is, presented to His Father in heaven by His earthly parents; a helpless infant, but yet a pleasing sacrifice, a sweet smelling savor. There, too, He comes as the first-born among many brethren, the Forerunner, through whom our little ones too can be acceptable to the Holy One. For now, when we bring our child to present him to the Lord, He looks down from heaven on the offering, and gives, in answer to the parent’s faith, to our child the spirit of His holy childhood. He was indeed made like us, that we might become like Him; He was made like unto our children, that they might be made like Him. He was not only Mary’s firstborn, but the Father’s first-born among many brethren. Where the first-fruits are holy the whole family is holy. The presentation of the Child Jesus to the Father gives us a right to present ours, and makes them acceptable too. Blessed thought! to place my child beside the holy Child, and in faith to claim that in Him my child is holy and accepted too. In Israel the presentation of the child was accompanied with a sacrifice to cleanse away the defilement of sin cleaving, at every birth, to both mother and child. This we need too. And what a mercy that the mother now can look to the blessed Jesus, the great sin-offering and atonement (Lev. 7: 6), for her cleansing from all sin, so that she may be accepted and fitted for being a true mother to this God-devoted child! And what mercy that the children, too, share in the efficacy of that great sacrifice ere they know it! that from their birth they now are holy to the Lord, and may receive that Holy Spirit which is the lawful inheritance of the seed of God’s believing people. We present our little one to the Lord, with Jesus as the great sin-offering making us acceptable and clean, and holy to the Lord.

The object of this presentation in the temple of the children was very specially to acknowledge God’s claim upon them, and to devote them to Him as His property. With what gladness and confidence parents do this when first they have seen Jesus presented in the temple. Or what does this mean? Has the Eternal God indeed not spared His only-begotten Son, but given Him up for us and our children? Has He in very deed given His Son, the Lord of glory, to be our and our children’s possession, to enter into all their feebleness and misery, to be like them subjected to a birth needing purification and presentation with sacrifice, and to a death like ours under the curse, and shall we now withhold our children from Him? Or shall we not most gladly present them before Him to be only and wholly His, devoted to His service and glory? Shall we not place our little one beside this holy Child, and on His merits, and say, Father! through Thy holy Child Jesus, with Him, in Him, like Him, I present my child to You, to be the Lord’s only and forever?

Be assured that in such a presenting of your child, after the example, in the power and spirit of God’s Child, there is a rich and sure blessing. Presented to God in Jesus, accepted in Jesus, it may now grow up with and like Jesus. Let your faith lay hold of the holy child-life of Jesus as belonging to your child, as communicable by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let your faith maintain and renew daily the solemn act in which you as parent appeared before the Lord to present your child to Him, ere you took it back to your home to rear and train. Let your faith rejoice in that definite Divine transaction in which, when you presented your child in the name of Jesus, it was accepted of the Father as His own. What we present to God, `according to that which is said in the law of the Lord,’ that, in accordance with His word, God takes. And what He takes He keeps. And our faith has only ever to look to God’s taking and keeping, to have the joyful assurance that the matter is finally settled between God and us. Let this faith make you strong to train the child for God, in a strength and grace which He will give, to secure His property for Himself. Let this faith speak to your child, as he can receive it, of his having been presented with Jesus, like Jesus, in Jesus, to the Father, and of his fellowship in the life and spirit of Him who became the children’s Surety. Let the holy childhood of Jesus overshadow and sanctify the childhood of your little one. Let your children grow up in the friendship and the footsteps of the holy Child. Live in everything as those who are going to train children who are to be like Jesus. If the thought appear too high, let it but constrain you to ask the Father whether He does indeed desire your child to be wholly like His, and whether He does expect of you to train it to be so. The answer will not be withheld, and the presentation of Jesus in the temple will become to you a pledge of the grace that enables you to see how Jesus is in everything the promise of what your child can be, and to train him accordingly.

We all know how, in the economy of grace and in the work of salvation for man, there are always two powers in action, the Divine and the human. To the former corresponds faith, that ever looks to God’s promise and power; to the latter works, without which faith cannot be perfected, and which obey and fulfil the will of God. In our study of the teachings of God’s Word on the parent’s calling, we have ever found how these two aspects of truth are presented by turns, and how, while at one moment everything appears to depend upon a parent’s faith in what God does, very soon after a parent’s character and conduct appear to decide all. The two are inseparably interwoven: the more intently we pursue the one line of thought, the clearer will the other become. And we shall see that the deeper our insight into the indispensable necessity of either, the greater will be our felt need of the other as its complement.

We have here again been meditating on the spiritual side, and apparently speaking less of the practical training of daily life. Let all parents be assured that there is nothing more intensely practical than an act of real faith. If our presenting a child to the Lord be the deed of an intelligent, childlike, heartfelt faith, it will have its mighty influence on our daily treatment of the child. If it be renewed from day to day, it will have its effect on our whole relation to the little one growing up under our care. As we think of it as God’s devoted and accepted property, as we regard ourselves as trustees to whom it has been committed for keeping and training, as we realize how God never would expect of our feebleness to take charge aright of an immortal spirit without providing the grace to do it well, and give ourselves with the child to a life of consecration and holiness, our faith will be the vital principle ruling all our conduct.

`John answered, saying, I indeed baptize you with water; but there cometh He who is mightier than I, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.’ Luke 3: 16.

Man has a twofold nature: there is the external and visible; there is the internal, unseen, spiritual. Sin brought both equally under the power of the curse. In redemption both are to be made partakers of the glorious liberty of the children of God: `we wait for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body;’ the whole man, body and spirit, is to be saved. All God’s dealings with us have respect to both sides of our nature; through the external He seeks to reach the inner man; the inner again is renewed that thence the blessing may stream out and take possession of the outer man.

It is on this ground that we have the twofold baptism of which our text speaks: the baptism with water, and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The Baptist teaches us the relation existing between the two; the insufficiency of the baptism with water in itself, and its high value as the pledge and the preparation of what was to come. In his words, ministers and parents, through whom together the little ones receive their baptism of water, find the clearest light on their duty towards the baptized child, and on the spirit in which they themselves, and afterwards the child under their guidance, are to regard its baptism.

And first we note the faith which the baptism with water warrants and demands as a sign and seal of the baptism of the Spirit. It is a sign in which God sets forth the working of regeneration, the cleansing of our nature by the renewal of the Holy Spirit. It is also a seal, an assurance that, where God has given the water, He most certainly gives the Spirit too, to the faith that claims and takes it. When John had come, the coming of Christ was certain too; when John had baptized with water, the baptism with the Spirit was certain too. God gave the one to awaken faith and expectation for the other. So intimate is the connection, that our Savior did not hesitate to speak of being ‘born of water and the Spirit;’ thus closely does He join and make them one. God would teach us that what He has meant to be one, and made one in promise, our faith can make one in reality. As in the whole economy of grace the connecting link between God’s promise and His fulfilment is our faith, so here too. The promise of God is no empty word, though our unbelief may make it of none effect. In His purpose the water and the Spirit are inseparably united: `what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder;’ let not a parent’s unbelief rest content with the water without the Spirit. Claim and accept with the most assured confidence the baptism of the Spirit for your child; and in faith praise for it as the divinely secured heritage of your little one.

Let us now observe the work to which the baptism with water calls and pledges us. The whole history of John teaches us that the Spirit could not be received until the way had been prepared for Him. The Baptist knows how little his labors avail until the baptism of the Spirit is given. And yet he labors. He does the double work of preaching repentance of sin and faith in the Lamb of God. A most blessed lesson for the Christian parent. In some children the workings of the Spirit are given from the very birth. In others they become manifest at very different stages of later growth. But in all, the manifestation of the Spirit needs a parent’s education in the lines of John’s preaching. The child needs to be taught what sin is and what repentance is, what the giving up of everything that is not according to the will of God. And it needs to be pointed to Jesus, the Lamb of God, through faith in whom the full influx of the Spirit is to come. So that, just as in the parent there is to be the harmony of faith and work, so the child no less from its earliest youth has to be trained for a God who asks to be trusted and obeyed. It is by the obedience of faith that parent and child are prepared for the fulfilment of the promise.

Learn one more lesson from John. The secret of the wondrous union between faith and work in him you will find in his deep humility. His preaching had been with mighty power. A great revival of religion was taking place; all men were flocking to him; no prophet in Israel had ever preached as he had done. And yet he says, `The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.’ It is ever thus. The more the soul has received of the vision and the fellowship and the power of the Holy One, the deeper the sense of its utter nothingness and absolute dependence. But then, also, the deeper its confidence in the truth and power of Him whom it has seen, and the greater its courage for His work, because it knows whence its help most surely comes. The thought might rise, or we might even hear others say it, that the assured confidence of the Spirit’s being given to our children may lead to pride, or may slacken exertion in their behalf. He that understands what faith is knows the answer. True faith and deep humility are inseparable, because faith is the becoming nothing to let God be all. And so true faith and faithful labor are no less inseparable, because faith yields itself to God to use and to work through us. Let it be with the parent as with John; there is nothing that makes us so strong to honor God as when we are bound by the threefold cord of strong faith, earnest effort, and deep humility.

Christian parent! have you accepted the promise of the Spirit with the water? Oh, hold that promise fast in a living faith. Praise God unceasingly for His gift to your child, even when you do not yet see its fulfilment. In your daily home-life, let everything be subordinated to the high destiny for which thy God has entrusted a child to you: he is to be a vessel filled with His Spirit. Labor earnestly and hopefully with this blessed prospect in view. As often as these labors teach you your impotence or your unfaithfulness, look to Him whose servant you are, and who has made you the messenger of the Spirit. He will fit you for the work He has given you to do. Jesus has said, `He that believeth in me, rivers of living water shall flow out of his belly.’ Believe in Jesus! try again, and once again, and ever more again the unexhausted fulness of that word; live your life by the faith of the Son of God. Through you the Spirit will flow out to your child. And each baptism you witness will be the glad reminder of the riches of the inheritance of your child too.

And, you ministers of Christ, if any such read these lines — to whom is committed the ministration of this holy baptism, seek, oh, seek, like John, with every baptism to testify that He who has sent you to baptize with water has said to you that there is One coming after you to baptize with the Holy Spirit! Let us pray God to make all His servants indeed ministers of the Spirit, that they may have grace in all their ministrations to speak and act as men who have realized that the Spirit has been given to follow and to seal the message and the work of faith. And especially that they may have grace to lead and train both parents and children into the apprehension of that presence of the Holy Spirit in their home-life, through which the family can again take its place as God’s first and choicest ordinance for the maintenance and the extension of the kingdom of heaven. It is as ministers and parents, as the whole Church, awakes to this truth, that the baptism of little children will no longer be, what it has too often been, a religious form, or a promise that is never fulfilled; but a sacrament, mighty and efficacious, of the presence of the Holy Ghost in the Church and in the home.

Gracious God! I thank You for the holy ordinance of baptism, with its Divine assurance of the baptism of the Spirit. And I thank You that as our little ones are with us children of the covenant and its spiritual promises, they also share in the seal of the covenant. And I thank You that their baptism is the token of their being holy to the Lord, and the heirs of the promise of the Spirit. Lord God! teach me, teach all believing parents, teach Your Church, to believe that, wherever in Your name the baptism of water is received, You wait to fulfil Your engagement to give the baptism of the Spirit too. In the great gift of Your Son, You have given us Him who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.

Blessed Lord Jesus! I come to You with my children. I bring them to You. I claim for them the baptism of the Spirit. In faith I accept of it. In that faith I would train them to believe in You, that they may by faith in You come into the personal possession of what I have received for them. Yea, ere they can yet believe, I offer myself, that through me and the influence of my life Your blessed Spirit may rest upon them.

Blessed Savior! give me grace in this faith to train them wisely, and according to Your will, preparing in them the way of the Lord. Amid the consciousness of unworthiness and impotence, may this be my one hope and aim, that my children may daily live under the rule of Your Holy Spirit. Amen.

‘One cometh from the ruler’s house, saying, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master. But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not; believe only, and she shall be made whole.’ Luke 8: 49, 50.

Fear not; only believe! to how many thousands that word has been the messenger of comfort and hope, as they struggled under the burden of sin, or sought for help in trial or difficulty! It told them that there was deliverance from fear in believing in Jesus; faith can banish fear. And yet, how many who have found a blessing in the word have forgotten that it is a word that especially belongs to parents. In every other use is but a loan; it is as parents that we have full right to it. It is Jesus, the Lord of the home, of parents and children, who speaks: ‘Fear not, only believe.’ The word reminds of the needful double lesson: in our children there is every reason for fear, in Jesus every reason for faith.

When we look at our children, there is every cause for fear. When we think of the evil nature they inherit from us, and the mighty power Satan has in this world into which they are entering, we may well fear. When we see, both in Scripture and in the world around us, how often the bright promise of childhood is blighted, and the children of a religious home depart into the ways of evil and of death, we may well fear. When we think of the dangers to which they often are exposed, in the very nurses that surround their infancy, in the little friends of their childhood, in the schools through which they must pass, in the spirit of the world with which they must come into contact, in the literature and the amusements and the business from which they cannot be kept separate, we may well fear.

And then, when we think of our children, and realize how feeble and unfit and unfaithful we are to take charge of them, the fear grows stronger whether they will indeed secure the blessing prepared for them. We know how the atmosphere we create and breathe through our home is stronger than all precept or external practice. We are deeply conscious of how much there still is of worldliness and selfishness, how much that is not in the fulness of the Spirit and the love of God; and we tremble at the thought of how our children may suffer from our lack of grace. We have reason to fear: would God that there were more of earnest, hearty fear of the power of sin and death!

To such the word of Jesus comes: Fear not, only believe. Only believe: for faith is the one condition through which the power and the salvation of God are given. Only believe: for it is by faith that we throw ourselves and our children on Jesus and secure His blessing. Only believe: let faith look upon God’s covenant with us and our seed, and see how He engages to give us all the grace we need as parents, as well as all the grace our children need. Only believe: it is faith that is the mighty renewing power in a man’s life that teaches him to obey, and do all that God has commanded. Only believe: this is the one thing Jesus asks of the parent who truly seeks his child’s deliverance from sin and death, and fears lest he fail of securing it.

This is now the one lesson we must seek to learn, that of a parent who has come to Christ with his child the first duty is faith. Just as with the penitent sinner, or the believer seeking more grace, all things are possible to him that believes. Our domestic, as our personal life, must be a life of faith. We must not only have the heart, but the home too, purified by faith. Faith is the one thing God asks for in His children. It was in each case faith that made it possible, made it simple and easy, as parents, to do what made them the channels of a Divine blessing to their children.

And so still the power to understand God’s purpose with our children, to save our household, to obey God’s will in all its rule, to offer our children to God, to bless our sons, and to save them from the destroyer, depends upon our faith. The living Christ, in whom is our salvation and our strength, every needed blessing and grace for us and our children — it is He who speaks, ‘Only believe.’ It is in the knowledge of what He is, it is in His presence, that such a faith is possible and must prevail. Has He not, if we are indeed His, redeemed our children as well as ourselves from the power of sin? Has He not come to make the covenant of promise, `thy God and the God of thy house,’ a brighter and fuller reality than ever it was to Abraham? Has He not secured for us, in the Holy Spirit, a power from on high to fulfil every obligation that rests on us as God’s children, this one, too, of keeping our children for Him to whom we belong? Has He not made true all the promises given of old, of God’s Spirit upon our offspring, of God’s Word not departing from the mouth of our seed’s seed for evermore, in that one word on the day of Pentecost, `the promise is to you and to your children’? Can we not count upon Him to give for us and each child just what we need, if only we believe?

`Only believe:’ let us take the command literally; faith has never yet been disappointed. Living faith will teach us to see new beauty and preciousness in our children. Living faith will awaken in us new earnestness and desire in everything to hold and to train them for God alone. Living faith will give its own hopeful and confiding tone to all our relation with God for them, and all our relation with them too. The name of ‘Faith Home’ has been appropriated to certain special institutions; we shall boldly claim it as the name of our own dear home, because everything is done in the faith of Jesus. The birth of our children, and our love to them, our prayer with and for them, our watching against their sins and our reproving them, our teaching and training, their lessons and employments and pleasure — all will be under the inspiring and regulating power of this: Only believe.

It need hardly be said that such a faith life in the home is not possible without the faith life in the heart. We cannot be to our children more than we are to God. `It is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me; I live by the faith of the Son of God:’ this must be the language of the father, the mother, who would have theirs a faith home. It is not only in moments of special need and prayer, or when we are in direct contact with the children, that Jesus says, Only believe. No, day by day, hour by hour, it must be, I live by the faith of the Son of God.

Christian parent! this life is for you. Learn only with each new morning to say: For this day I accept Jesus for all my duties as believer and as parent. Commit simply, commit fully to Him every duty, every difficulty, every circumstance, every moment, and say then confidently, I know in whom I have believed. It is He who spoke to me as parent the blessed word, Only believe; and I am persuaded that what I have committed to Him He is able to keep. This is the blessed secret of a faith life and a faith home.

Blessed Savior! I thank You for this precious word. I have long heard and understood that it is by faith alone the sinner is saved. I have begun to understand and experience something of what it is that a saved sinner is to live entirely by faith, and every hour to receive from You the life You have engaged to live in him. Lord, teach me the additional lesson that in the home-life faith is just as much the power of blessing, and that in all my relation with my family Your word still is, ‘Fear not, only believe.’ O Jesus, You are not only the sinner’s, but the parent’s, Friend; in nothing will You delight so much to reveal Your saving and sanctifying power as in the family life which You have redeemed to the service of Your kingdom.

O my Lord! I do pray that You to teach me and all parents how impossible it is to train our children aright, or be a blessing to them, except as we live the life of faith. Open our eyes to see all that You offer to our faith, and how our love to them, our influence on them, our education and our training, may all be inspired and purified and perfected by the faith in the power of Your finished redemption and Your abiding presence. Show us how all our own feebleness and our fears, all the waywardness of our children and all the wickedness in the world that tempts them, can be fully met by Your power and Your love, if we only trust You. O Lord Jesus! do teach us to know You as the Savior of our children from their very birth, and in the homes we have to form for them. And let our whole life and relation with them, day by day, every day and all the day, be in the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us. Amen.

`And all wept and bewailed her. But Jesus said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth.’ Luke 8: 52.

In God’s great school of tribulation there are many classes. In the department where God trains parents, there is one room which all greatly fear to enter. Many, as they are led into it, are seen struggling and murmuring. As its darkness closes in over them, they almost refuse to believe that God is love. Many pass through it, and come out of it, with hardly aught of the Divine comfort or holiness the chastisement was meant to bring, because they knew not why they were there, and were not silent to wait for the teaching and the blessing Jesus gives. Others, again, who entered trembling, can testify that the chamber of death — for of this we speak — was to them the gate of heaven; it was the death of a little one that first led them truly to know Jesus. As truly as to Jairus with his dead daughter, the child’s death was the parent’s life.

Let us see how Jesus meets the sorrowing parent in the chamber of death. The first thing He asks is silence and solitude. Jesus comes to the house, and finds `the crowd making a great tumult.’ At once He puts out the crowd, and goes in alone, with the parents and the three disciples. One of the things that most effectually hinders the blessing of affliction is that it is too much spent in the relationships with men, and comfort sought in their sympathy. One of God’s great objects in chastisement is, by clouding the light and the brightness of visible things, to draw the soul to Himself and the Unseen. `My soul is silent unto God;’ `I will hear what God the Lord will speak:’ such is the disposition God would fain have in those whom He visits. He has lessons, often difficult lessons, to teach the parents whose little one death has taken away; it is only when there is the teachableness that really looks to God Himself, and waits on Him, that the trial becomes fruitful in blessing.

What the lessons are in the dying chamber of a child it is not difficult to say. The parent is led to ask, Have I loved my child in the Lord, or looked upon it and treated it too much as my own possession? Has the spirit of my life and my home been truly an educating of my children for heaven and its holiness? Is there not worldliness, selfishness, sinfulness, of which this affliction must remind me? Has it indeed been, in all I seek for my family, `the kingdom first’? Affliction never can profit without heart-searching; and heart-searching is impossible except in the holy stillness of soul that is found in separation from man and meeting with God. Oh, let parents beware, in their time of trial, of the dissipation that comes from too much seeing of friends, from seeking and finding comfort in their company. God wants to see us alone; without this He cannot bless or comfort us. Jesus waits to reveal Himself in the power of His great salvation as the Surety of the parental covenant too — the Redeemer in whom the parent will find all the grace and blessing the covenant God has promised; but He cannot do it except the crowd is put out. He takes His three disciples with Him, that all His servants may learn in their ministry to remind us that by the bedside of a dying or a dead child Jesus wants to be alone with the parents. Even His ministers are only to come in as they come with Him, and point to Him.

And now that He is alone with the parents, now comes the comforting. `Weep not,’ He says. Jesus does not condemn weeping. He wept Himself; weeping ever touched His heart. And yet He says, `Weep not.’ `Woman, why weepest thou?’ was His very first resurrection word. It is as the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne, leads His redeemed, that all tears are wiped away. Jesus came to dry our tears. He says, `Weep not.’ Weeping is often self-indulgence, a nursing of our grief, the fruit of being too absorbed in ourselves, the object we mourn, or the suffering we endure. Weeping often hinders the voice of God being heard, hinders altogether the blessing the affliction was meant to bring. We are only occupied with what we suffer, and God would have us think of the cause of the suffering, the sin with which we have made Him suffer. By taking away a child, God meant to take us away from ourselves, and to make room in the heart for Himself. Weeping often only fills us with ourselves. God would have us in the affliction learn to bear, and love, and worship His will. Weeping is often the homage, yea, the adoration, of our own will.

Beloved mourner! hear the voice of Jesus say, `Weep not.’ He does not say it without a reason. It is not enough that the tumult of the crowd outside is put away, and that there is silence in the room; the tumult of thought and feeling must be hushed too, within the soul there must be silence. At the bidding of Jesus the gush of tears must be restrained, and the heart must turn to Him, to ask who this is who thus, with authority, bids us cease our weeping, and what He has to say to justify His injunction. Obedience to the command is the path to the comfort He brings.

And what is the comfort Jesus gives? He leads from the visible to the invisible; where we only see death, He speaks of life; He comes to rouse us to faith, and to it He reveals Himself as the Living and Lifegiving One. `Weep not: she is not dead, but sleepeth.’ With these words Jesus draws near to the lifeless form of each little one over whom a mother’s bursting heart is weeping, to remind her that death has been conquered,and that the loved one is not dead, in the terrible meaning which sin gave that word, but truly sleeps, in the deep and blessed sense which that word now has in His mouth.

Your little one is not dead. Judge not by sight. There is a better life than the life of this earth — the eternal life in which God dwells. In that eternal life there is a sleep provided for those who are in Christ Jesus, the blessed waiting time till He comes to gather all His own. As the life itself, and the glory in which it shall be fully manifested, is something that has not entered the heart to conceive, so this sleep, too, is something that passes knowledge. We only know for certain that it is a most blessed rest, rest in the bosom of Jesus. And Jesus asks if this is no comfort, to know that your little one, whom with yourself He took into His covenant before it could know Him, or your child, grown up and trained in the faith of the covenant, is now resting with Him. He took it that He might draw you heavenward. He took it that He might empty your heart, to make more room for Himself. He took it that you might be drawn to Him in your need, and be prepared for receiving the new revelation He has to give of His power, of His love, of Himself as your life.

It is Jesus Himself who comes to you to speak of all this. As in the Old Testament it was the God of the covenant who came to one believing parent after another with His promise of what their children should be; so in the New it is Jesus, the Surety of the children, in whom the parent will find the grace for all he needs to train a seed for God. Jesus said, `Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.’ In the incarnation of Jesus all that God of old had promised of blessing to parents and children is now fulfilled. If we but learn to know Jesus aright, to believe on Him fully, to live in the faith of Him, our home and family life will be holy to the Lord. No sacrifice is too great, if we only learn to know Jesus aright. It was in the chamber where Jairus’ daughter lay dead that her parents learnt to know Jesus.

Weeping parents! this is God’s one purpose and desire, this is God’s one great thought of blessing and comfort: in His Son Christ Jesus He has come near to bless and take possession of you. Let this your time of affliction not pass without a hitherto unknown experience of what Jesus is as the parents’ Friend, their Teacher, Comforter, and Sanctifier. And so the loss you have sustained will be restored tenfold in the blessing it is made to yourself and the children still left you. Or even if it were the only one, in the power and blessing which this new knowledge of Jesus, the Living One, the parent’s and the children’s Friend, will enable you to bring to others, you will yet be led to confess how that death has become your greatest gain. The presence and the power and the love of Jesus can more than compensate for the absence and the loss of the child.

Blessed Lord! in this my hour of deep sorrow I come to You, my Savior and the Savior of my little one. Condescend, I beseech you, to come in with me, my Lord, to the chamber of death, where Your weeping child waits for You. Oh, come in and be Yourself my Comforter and my Teacher. Put out, I pray You, the tumult of the crowd, all the sad thoughts and uncontrolled feelings that keep me from hearing Your voice. Speak Yourself; say to the storm, Be still! and let Your presence be the great calm. O my Savior! speak: I desire to hear.

Speak, Lord, if it pleases You, of Your holy will, and Your right to do with Your own even what pleases You, and teach me to say, `Thy will be done.’ Speak, as You see it is needful, of my sin and wandering from You, of my love of the creature, of my lack of love to You and delight in Your fellowship, and make me see how this chastisement of Your love was what I needed to make me partaker of Your holiness. Speak, Lord! and teach me.

Speak, Lord! and comfort Your child. Reveal Yourself to me as the Resurrection and the Life, the Shepherd who has taken His lamb into His bosom. Reveal Yourself as my Shepherd! who will see to it that the blessing of the affliction is secured, by coming nearer to me with Your abiding presence. Reveal Yourself as from henceforth more than ever the house-Friend, making Yourself at home with us, to sanctify our family life more than ever into the blessed experience of Your care for the homes of Your people. Come in, Lord Jesus! come in to me in the chamber of death, and, as You have taken my child to Yourself, take me and my beloved home, and make us entirely Yours. Amen.

`There was carried out one that was dead, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not.’ Luke 7: 12, 13.

Any attempt to set forth the teaching of Scripture on the education of children would certainly be incomplete, if it had nothing to say on what always is so sad and difficult, and yet often has been so blessed and successful a work — a widow’s training of her orphan children. There are few sights which so claim and attract sympathy, both human and Divine. It is indeed one of the sorest trials that can befall a woman. The husband for whom she left her father’s home, on whom she counted, and leant as her guide and guardian, in whom her life and her love found their joy, to whom she looked as her help and strength in the training of her children — her husband is taken from her, and she is left alone and desolate. The stricken heart seeks in vain for the object of its affection; in temporal prospects there is perhaps nothing to which to cling, and the sight of the beloved little ones still left her, instead of being a treasure to which her love now clings, at first only gives new bitterness to the trial. It is not only the heart of man that is touched by this thought: the heart of God too. Throughout Scripture, from the repeated commands in the law of Moses down to James’s testimony that pure religion teaches us to visit `the fatherless and widows’ in their affliction, God never forgets the widow. `A Father of the fatherless, and a Judge of the widows, is God in His holy habitation;’ `He upholdeth the fatherless and the widow;’ `Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust in me’ (Ps. 68: 5, 146: 9; Jer. 49: 11): Such words reveal to us the very heart of God.

And now, when Jesus came, how could He fail of showing in this too, that He was the Father’s image, that God was in Christ. It is as if the picture of the Master’s life would be incomplete without the story of the widow of Nain. In what He said of the widow’s mite, we see how His eye watches over a widow’s poverty, and values, what men would call, her little deed of love. At Nain we see Him as the Comforter of widowed motherhood. Let us go to Nain, the sacred spot to which so many a widow has resorted to find in Jesus her Friend and Lord, to learn what Jesus, the Friend and Savior of our children, has to say to a widow weeping over her child. Not only when the tears are those of sorrow over one taken away, but those of anxious love or sad distress at the sight of those still left behind, Jesus meets us with His, Weep not.

Weep not, widowed mother, as you look at your little ones, and the heart almost breaks at the thought of their being fatherless. Weep not, but come, follow me, as we seek Him who has been anointed `to comfort all that mourn.’ Weep not, as you tremble to think of how you are to train and educate them all alone in your feebleness. Let your soul for a little be silent unto Him who came from heaven to say to the widow, `As one whom his mother comforteth, will thy God comfort thee;’ weep not.

Weep not! And may the wounded heart not have at least the comfort that the unrestrained flow of its tears does often bring? Just think for a little moment. As little as the widow of Nain knew why Jesus spoke thus, do you know it yet. But let it be enough that Jesus says it. All the other parents, whose children Jesus blessed, came and asked for help; He speaks to the widow without being asked. Her widowhood is her sufficient plea: `When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said, ‘Weep not.’ Jesus is looking on you; do not let your tears keep you from looking and listening to Him. Be sure that if it could have been, He would have spared you that cup; that now that it has come, He is looking on you in compassion, waiting to comfort and to bless; in the tenderest love, but with the voice of authority Jesus says, Weep not.

But Jesus was not one who comforts only with words; His words were always followed by deeds.

And so, if you will look up and see, He will show you what He will do. To the widowed mother at Nain He gave back the dead son, who had been to her in the place of a husband. And His believing people know that, though it may last a little while, the departed ones who have died in the Lord will be given back to them, in glory and forever. Look up to Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, weeping widow! and believe; them which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. The resurrection, the meeting again, the being ever with the Lord, are realities, as real; more real, more mighty than the separation and the sorrow; look up in faith, it is Jesus who speaks, Weep not.

But oh, the desolation that meantime fills the heart and the sense of utter feebleness and unfitness to fulfil my charge with these boys, these girls, who still live, and who do so need a father’s wise, firm, loving rule. Dear mother! when Jesus says, Weep not, He never speaks without doing; He gives what can dry the tears. What think you? if Jesus were to take the place of the father to these children, would not this make you smile and sing even through the tears. If, as a living reality, Jesus would undertake the responsibility of educating those children, of being your Adviser and your Strength and your assurance of success in your work, would this not be enough to stay those tears? And just this is what He comes to do. What God spoke of old, `Leave thy orphans to me, and let thy widows trust in me;’ `The Lord upholdeth the fatherless and the widow,’ Jesus comes in human tenderness, and in the nearness of the Holy Spirit, to fulfil. You may trust your fatherless children to Him; He will preserve them; He will, in a Divine fulness and power of meaning, be the father of the fatherless.

It may be that a widowed mother reads these words, to whom they have but little meaning. Though a Christian, she has so little yet learned to live by faith, to count the unseen things of faith surer and clearer than the things of sight, that the promise appears all vague and distant. She hardly dares hope that it ever will become a reality, that she may be quite sure that Jesus will do it for her. She does not feel as if she is good or holy or believing enough, that her children should receive such a wonderfully special and Divine guidance.

My sister! would you learn what Jesus would have of you, that you may with confidence depend upon your children being preserved and blessed by Him, and your tears pass away in the sunlight of His love and care, come and listen. Of a widow He asks but one thing — ‘Let thy widows trust in me:’ `She that is a widow indeed trusteth in God, and continueth in supplication and prayer night and day.’ Trust me! this was what He claimed from the widow of Nain; this is what He asks of you. Trust Jesus! this is the message I bring you this day in your weeping, anxious widowhood. Trust Jesus! trust Him for yourself. Let each thought of your departed one lead you to say, I have Jesus with me — I will trust Him. Let the consciousness of sin and shortcoming, of unfitness for your mother’s work, awaken the prayer, Jesus! I will trust You, to make me what I should be. Trust Him with your children, with their temporal and their eternal interests. Only remember, the life of trust just needs a life of undivided, of simple, childlike surrender. Be wholly His, and He will prove Himself wholly yours. Tarry in prayer and supplication, in the silent, restful committal of every care and fear to Him. Really trust Him; in every prayer make this the chief thing. I have now entrusted my need to Him, I trust Him with it; I am confident He is mighty and faithful to keep that which I have committed unto Him. Trust Him wholly; they who wholly trust Him, find Him wholly true.

And if ever the double trial of the widow of Nain should be yours, and you have to mourn the loss not only of a husband, but an only son, oh, remember that there is still Jesus, the Comforter of the widow doubly desolate! This will be the time in which you will find Him become doubly precious, and you will have grace to say, My flesh and my heart fail; but God, but Jesus, is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.

Blessed Lord Jesus! how shall I praise You for that thoughtful love which would not give us the record of Your life without the story of the widow of Nain. Blessed be Your name for the revelation of the special place the widow has in Your heart, and the tenderness of that compassion which drew near to her before ever she knew that she might look to You! Lord Jesus! for every widowed mother we now pray to You. Teach her to come to You with her fatherless children. We bless You that there are thousands of widowed mothers who have proved how wonderfully You can bless the feeble, and how richly You have blessed their children.

Teach the widow, we pray You, to put her trust in God and in You. You are able and You are willing to do what man dare not expect, what man counts impossible, if we honor You by trusting Your love. O Savior! help the feeble faith of every widow. Let her desolation and her sorrow and her feebleness compel her now wholly to cast herself with her children on You, to depend upon You alone. Draw Yourself near, O You compassionate One, and reveal Yourself. Speak into the depths of the sorrowing, anxious heart Your word of comfort: Weep not! Oh, let Your widowed child hear You speaking, see You come to take charge, and provide, and care for the education of her children. Teach her that her one work is to trust You, in separation from the world, in holy devotedness to You, to trust You for a more than human, a Divine guidance and blessing on her children. Let her continue in prayer and supplication, in daily communion with You the Unseen One, the portion of her children. Let her then fully know how truly You are the widow’s Friend, the Savior and the Friend of her children. Amen.

‘There was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at Capernaum. He went unto Jesus, and besought Him that He would come down and heal his son; for he was at the point of death.’ John 4: 46, 47.

Here is an experience that almost every parent passes through. In the wonderful training of the parent through the child, God uses a child’s sickness as one of His special means of blessing. And in the parent’s training of the child, the sickroom has often been the place when the parent first fully found his way to the child’s heart, to guide it to Jesus and the distinct confession of faith in Him. Let us prepare ourselves for the children’s sickrooms by the lessons the beautiful story of the nobleman of Capernaum teaches us as to how sickness is to be met, to be healed, to be blessed.

How is sickness to be met? God’s great gift to sinful men is Jesus; in His Son He meets our every need. And the one great thing God asks of in us, as the spirit in which we are to meet Him in Christ, is, faith — the trustful surrender to let this blessed Jesus be to us all that the Father would have Him be. And because He has been given to us, not only as individuals, but as parents, for us to accept and to use on behalf of our children, until we can lead them to accept Him for themselves, the one thing that God asks of the parent is, faith — trust in Jesus. As faith in God was the one thing by which the saints of old pleased God, and did all that was pleasing to Him, and to which God therefore sought to train them, so faith in His Son is the one supreme grace by which the Christian parent can please God, and obtain His blessings on his children. And all God’s leadings and dealings have this one object and purpose, to make us strong in faith, giving glory to God.

When God allows sickness to come upon the child of one of His believing people, perhaps still young or an infant, and the parents’ hearts are agonized by the sight of its pain or the fear of losing it, the question comes with terrible force, Why God permits all this suffering? The answer Scripture gives is, for the trial and so for the purifying and the strengthening of faith. God’s one purpose with parent and child is to exercise and increase faith in them. By faith they become capable of receiving the revelation of God’s glory, and showing it forth again; by faith God can dwell in them, and work through them. God’s one desire is that they should more fully believe in His Son; and our one desire should be to meet the sickness by faith in Jesus.

This is the one great lesson the story of the nobleman teaches us — the growth and increase of faith in the dealing with Christ. It begins as a general faith in what he has heard of Christ’s compassion and power; this brings him into contact with Christ. He believes in Jesus as a healer. It becomes a distinct faith in the promise he received of healing: `the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him.’ He believes in Jesus as the Healer of his child. And then the faith in Jesus the Healer is perfected in the faith in Him as Savior and Lord: `himself believed and his whole house.’ This is God’s one purpose with sickness; let it be ours too. Let the chastisement discover to us our unbelief, and that fleshly and worldly spirit, that unholy life, in which unbelief has its root and its strength. Let us look from the hand that holds the rod to the face of Him whose is the hand; to see that face in truth makes trust easy and real.

How the sickness is to be healed? This is the second question our story suggests. The answer it gives is very simple: By the power of Jesus. In Matthew Christ’s healing work is spoken of as the natural result of His atoning work of which Isaiah had spoken (Isa. 53; Matt. 8) as a bearing of our sickness. He took upon Him our human nature in the flesh, and, having redeemed it, lifted it into the glory of the eternal life in heaven. When on earth, He delighted in healing the sick, as something His loving heart could do for them even when He could not save their souls. In His Word He left among the heritage of the exceeding great and precious promises which are the riches of His Church, the assurance that the prayer of faith would save the sick, because the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. He has a thousand times over by His Spirit led His children, applying the promise of an answer to believing prayer, the promise of His doing whatsoever we will if we abide in Him, to believe and receive the healing of a sick child. His great desire in sickness is to educate us into that simple, child-like faith, which, while it cannot give account of its assurance to reason, yet through the Holy Spirit has the assurance that its petition is granted, that it has what it asks. Let us but see that the lesson of the chastisement has been accepted, that the sin, or the want of entire harmony of our life with God’s will, has been confessed and pardoned, has been cast out and conquered; let us claim the life of the beloved sick one for God’s glory in him and in us as parents: the word of Jesus can come to us as real as to the nobleman: Your son lives.

And we shall learn how sickness is to become a blessing. The Lord Jesus used it as a means of drawing to Himself; when it had done this He took it away, that the healing might bind to Himself. When the sickness had done its work, the healing perfected what had been begun. The sickness had brought the nobleman to Jesus in hope and expectancy; the healing left him a confirmed believer, with his household. There is a very prevalent opinion that sickness is better than health for true piety; in the life of Christ and in His work we see no token of this. Health obtained direct from Jesus in the prayer of faith, health received consciously as a gift of redeeming love, is one of the most wonderful spiritual blessings: a bearing in the body the mark of the hand of Jesus. Let each parent, whom our Lord leads into this school of sickness, realize this fully, that health, indeed asked and received in faith, may be a token of even more intimate contact with Jesus than the blessing of the sick-bed ever has been. As this is understood, we shall feel courage to make known our desire for a health in which there is to be power for God’s glory. The new revelation of the power and the love of Jesus may make us and our household believers as never before — full of faith and devotion to Him who has blessed us.

Parents! our sick children are God’s messengers to lead us to Jesus and to faith in Him. The sickness has a message and a blessing. It calls us to remember parental sin, and to confess it. It calls us to search the heart and life and home as to whether we have held our children wholly for God, trained them as holy to the Lord. It comes to make the heart tender and humble, and to draw it out to Jesus. Oh, let us beware lest in all the care or sorrow the sickness occasions, in all the means to which we flee to seek deliverance, in all the fear of losing our child, we miss God’s purpose. He wants to bring us, subdued and quiet, in faith and hope to Jesus. Let us pray God very earnestly that we may not miss the blessing of the sickness.

And, much more, let us accept the greater blessing of the healing. The exercise of faith honors God more than anything. The availing ourselves of our privilege, the trusting of Jesus’ word and power, the learning to know Him as indeed our Helper, the experience of His healing power in distinct answer to our faith — it is this that binds to Christ. We learn to know Him as the Living One. We have the token of the acceptance of our surrender and our trust. Our home has become the scene of the display of His kingly power. It has sealed afresh the parental covenant. We and our home become the Lord’s as never before.

Blessed Redeemer! we come to You to learn the lesson that sickness has but this one purpose — to draw us to Yourself. When You went on earth, the sickness of a child was one of the cords with which the Father drew men to You. And still He takes parents into the sickroom of their little ones, that there they may learn to seek and find You, to wait for and to receive the revelation of Your power and love.

Lord Jesus! teach us, we pray, in all the time of our children’s sickness to learn the blessed lesson of coming to You and trusting You. We may be most sure that You are watching over us to teach, to comfort, to sanctify, and to heal. Teach us especially that You are still the same as when on earth, mighty to bid the sickness depart, and to free from the power of death. To spare the life of a child for Your service, to gladden and sanctify a parent’s heart by Your grace, and for the Father’s glory, You are still ready to hear the prayer of faith and raise up the child. Oh, grant us this faith, that we may honor You, and not hinder You from proving with what compassion You hear a parent’s cry.

And grant, Lord, when You graciously have heard, and given back a child to the parent’s faith, that the blessed fruit may be that the parents with their whole house believe in You as never before. May all see that Jesus is now Lord and Master, the beloved Friend of the home. As the sickness leads to seek You, may the healing bind to You and Your blessed service. Amen.