Joy in Heaven over One Soul.
By Editor
It has come to us with a good deal of freshness of late, how dear souls are to God. We are in the habit of measuring the divine love for sinners by the sacrifice which came to its crest on the cross. No doubt that is the true measure of the divine love and the place rightly to estimate the value of a human soul in God's sight. Nevertheless when we read that there is joy in heaven over one soul that repenteth, we get a new apprehension of how dear souls must be to God. We have known some pastors (and have had the experience ourselves not seldom), after a meeting in which special care and effort had been made to bring men to decision, to turn away discouraged and cast down because only one soul came forward to confess Christ as Saviour and Lord. But if the repentance of that one soul was the occasion of joy in heaven, not among the angels, but "in the presence of" the angels—joy in the very heart of God made manifest even in the presence of angels—how ought we to rejoice over the conversion of souls, even over one soul. We remember that Jesus got his disciples one by one; that he preached his most famous discourses to congregations of one; namely, to Nathaniel, to Nicodemus, and to the woman of Samaria. It was to one leper that he spake a saving word; to one sinful woman that he declared forgiveness and life. One by one he gathered them. It was for one soul, the Eunuch, that Philip was taken away from the great crowds in Samaria and sent down, by the way of the desert, to preach Jesus. Let us not underrate the value of one soul. Surely when we were converted we were but one. That was a great day to us; a great joy to our loved ones, who had been longing and watching and praying for us. It was a great joy to God, who had given his Son to die for us, as really and as wholly as if we had been the only soul which had sinned and fallen away from him. Saul of Tarsus was but one soul; and yet he was dear enough to God to warrant our Lord Jesus coming from heaven to the earth, in person, to win him to himself. The tendency in our day is to seek after great things and large, immediate, and aggregated results. We are impatient of what has been called "hand-picking" for souls. It is true that the first great ingatherings were by the hundreds; but after that, we judge, the work of saving men went on more after the fashion of winning them one by one.—Independent.