Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence by Lucy Welch

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 10, 1910

“Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence”

By Lucy Welch

MRS. LUCY WELCH

Among the traits that seem especially prominent in early childhood, perhaps none is more pronounced than confidence, and in it lie great possibilities for good or for evil.

The Creator has put the parent in God's place to the little child, that through the parent the child might become acquainted with God, and through its filial confidence and affection be led to implicit trust in the divine Father. What a mighty protection, what a wall of defense, has God ordained shall thus be placed around the child! And we are all but children in his sight, and without the confidence in him we shall wander from the strait and narrow way that leads to eternal life.

I once knew a child who was carefully reared, and who always confided in her mother, but one day she found herself for a little time where she could not avail herself of that privilege. She had been taught to repeat a prayer each night on retiring, but she had never gone to the Lord alone for what she needed. She reasoned that if the Lord heard her pray each evening, he could hear her where she was, and could do for her what her mother would do were she there. And the answer to her prayer, which came immediately, was an assurance to her that Jesus was her friend— a friend to whom she could go at any time.

Well would it be for us did we never doubt that Friend! While our first parents maintained their confidence in God, the artful deceiver could not harm them, but, pierced with the poisoned arrows of suspicion, they became an easy prey.

On this point, too, Satan tempted our blessed Saviour. But Jesus met him with God's own word. To Jesus that word was truth, eternal truth. Satan well knows that if man's confidence is unshaken in that word, man must triumph in its power. Hence his determined efforts to lead men to disregard that word. But to us the Lord says, “Cast not away . . . your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.”

Takoma Park, D. C.