Better Days Before

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 14, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 23.

Better Days Before

THERE is always a tendency among Christians to hark back to an oftentimes exaggerated past, and wish that the same blessings, the same power, the same success, could be in God's work now.

The wish is laudable, but there is danger in it, and its expression is not a good sign.

The danger is that efforts will be put forth to use past methods, looking to them for life, when these methods may be worthless now and were not the best then. The great fact is that it is life, life from above, that is needed, and mere methods will not give life. The dress of Elijah or John the Baptist would not bestow the power of either.

God does not want us to look to the past for the past's strength and wisdom. He records its bestowal and outworking as an encouragement for the present, to let us know that the God of yesterday is the God of to-day, and will be of to-morrow when to-morrow dawns. It is to say to us that God has the same power, sufficient to every task to-day. It waits our demand.

The Jews were ever looking back to the deliverance from Egypt; they were boasting of the miracles of the Red Sea and the Jordan, when God would have them grasp the power to deliver from present idolatry and bondage. He had far greater deliverance for His people, so much greater that they would no longer say that Jehovah lived who brought them out of Egypt, but Jehovah lived who brought them from all the scattered regions of captivity, slavery, and sin in the immortal land, where added to the song of Moses will be "the song of the Lamb." Jer. 16:14-16; Rev. 15:2, 3. Praise God for past victory. Hope for all the future. But by living faith grasp His power for the present.