p. 567 | OUR GUIDE by Dr. Maclaren

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 22, 1881

OUR GUIDE.

By Dr. Maclaren

Moses sought to secure Hobab for a guide because he was a native of the desert, and had traveled all over it. His experience was his qualification. We have a brother who has himself traveled every foot of the road by which we have to go, and his footsteps have marked out with blood a track for us to follow, and have trodden a footpath through the else pathless waste. He knows "how to encamp in this wilderness," for he himself has "tabernacled among us," and by experience has learned the weariness of the journey and the perils of the wilderness.

His life is our pattern. Our marching orders are brief and simple: follow your leader, and plant your feet in his footprints.

That is the sum of all ethics, and the vade mecum for practical life. However diverse our duties and circumstances are, the principles which come out in the divine record of that fair life and wondrous death, will fit with equal closeness to us all; and so divine and all-comprehensive is it that it abides as the sufficient pattern for every class, for every stage, for every variety of character, for every era, and every land, till the end, and beyond the end.

Our poor, weak hearts long for a brother's hand to hold us up, for a brother's voice to whisper a word of cheer, for a brother's example to animate as well as to instruct. An abstract law of right is but a cold guide, like the stars that shine, keen in the polar winter. It is hard even to find in the bare thought of an unseen God guiding us by his unseen Spirit within and his unseen Providence without, the solidity and the warmth which we need. Therefore we have mercifully received God manifest in the flesh, a Brother to be our guide and the Captain of our salvation.

To him then transfer all those feelings of confidence and affection too often lavished on men. The noblest use for the precious ointment of love, which the poorest of us bears in the alabaster-box of the heart, is to break it on his head.

Thus loving and following him, we shall be set free from undue dependence on human helpers whilst they are with us, from eagerness to secure them, from dread of losing them, from despair when they depart. Perplexities will disappear. Duty will become plain. Life will not be a weary march through an unknown land where we have to choose our path by our own poor wisdom, and death is often the penalty of a blunder. All our duty and joy lie in the one command: "Follow me;" and if we only ask him to be with us "instead of eyes," and accept his gentle leading, we shall not walk in darkness, but may plunge into thickest night and the most unknown land, assured that he will "lead us by a right way to the city of habitation."