The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1900, Page 9

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Che Autheran Pioneer.

A MISSIONARY MONTHLY.

PuBLISHED BY THE EVANGELICAL LuTHeRAN SynopicaL CoNFERENCE oF NortH AMERICA.

R. A. BISCHOFF, Editor.

Entered at the Post Office at St. Louis, Mo., as second-class matter.

Vol. XXII.

St. Louis, Mo., M

arch, 1900. :

No. 3.

Is it Nothing to You?

Lamentations 7,12.

All ye who pass by,
To Jesus draw nigh,
To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?
Your ransom and peace,
Your surety He is;
Come, see if there ever was sorrow like His.

For what you have done
His blood must atone,
The-Father has punished for you His dear Son;
The Lord in the day
Of His anger did lay
Your sins on the Lamb and He bore them away.

For you and for me
He pray’d on the tree;
The prayer is accepted, the sinner‘is free;
That sinner am I
Who on Jesus rely,
And come for the pardon God will not deny.

My pardon [ claim
For a sinner I am;
A sinner, believing in Jesus’ name:
He purchased the grace
Which now I embrace:
O Father, Thou know’st He has died in my place!

Love moved Him to die:

; On this I rely;

My Saviour hath loved me, I can not tell why!
But this thing I find,
We two are so joined,

He'll not be in glory and leave me behind!

With joy we approve
The plan of His love,
A wonder to all both below and above;
When time is no more,
We still shall adore
That ocean of love without hottom or shore!
Selected.
—_—_2_< o-<a oe >

God Spared not His own Son.

God spared not His own Son. When He
saw Him laden with the sins of the world,
He poured out upon Him the vials of His
Wrath. Behold what sin is! Men often think

lightly of sin, and speak of it, and practice

it as if it amounted to nothing. But, sin is
a horrible thing. It is a transgression of
God’s holy law. It is a rebellion against the
Almighty. By it we deserve God's wrath
and displeasure, temporal death and eternal
damnation. Yes, sin is a horrible thing. ‘The

sin-hating God did not spare His own Son
when that Son took the sinners’ place and
bore the sinners’ guilt. God’s own Son had
to endure for sin the most bitter sufferings,
the greatest agony, the most shameful death.
Nothing but the blood of Him who is His
Father’s well-beloved Son could atone for the
guilt of sin. How dark, then, the guilt of
that abominable thing —sin!

God spared not HisownSon. Behold the
love of God! He so loved the world that
He gave His only-begotten Son to suffer and
to die for us, and thus to save us from sin
and everlasting woe. He laid upon Him the
iniquity of us all that we might be free from
all its guilt and punishment. Was ever love
like this? We did not deserve God’s love.
We were not His friends. We were His ene-
mies. We were in rebellion against Him, and
everlasting damnation was our due. But God
does not desire the sinner’s death. He so
loved us that He spared not His own Son,
but delivered Him up for us all. Thus we
were redeemed from all sins, from death, and
from the power of the devil, not with gold
or silver, but with the holy precious blood of
God’s own Son, and with His innocent suffer-
ing and death. How can the sinner escape
if he despises such love and rejects the re-
demption it procured? He despises and re-
jects the only way of salvation. Let us not
be so foolish and so wicked. Let us rather
as poor, lost, and condemned sinners put all
our trust for salvation in the sufferings and
death of our Saviour and rejoice that ‘‘God
so loved the world that He gave His only-
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
Him should not perish, but have everlast-
ing life.”

——_s +o or oo

“He Delivered Him up for us All.”

A lady whose health was shattered, and
whose husband had lost his money, com-
plained one day to her pastor that God was
harsh in His dealings with her. While they
were talking, her sleeping baby awoke, and
she took it up to quiet its cries. A bright
fire was blazing in the grate, and the pastor
suddenly inquired: ‘‘What enemy is so dear

to you, or what interest is so great to you,
that in order to save the one, or to secure
the other, you would put your babe into that
fire?’’? She looked at him a moment with an
expression of surprise and indignation, and re-
plied, ‘‘You know perfectly well that I would
not cast my child into the fire for any con-
sideration whatever.’”

‘And yet,’ the pastor said, ‘‘God cast His
only-begotten and well beloved Son into the
fire. God spared Him not, though He saw
His deep humiliation, though He beheld Him
weltering in bloody sweat in Gethsemane,
though He witnessed His frightful agonies on
Calvary, and still you doubt His goodness.”’

Surely the greater gift includes the smaller,
and he who really believes that God’s love
for him was so great that He gave His Son
to the death of the cross, can easily believe
that God’s love for him is infinite, even when
calling him to listen to the voice of the rod.

‘If God be for us, who can be against us?
He that spared not His own Son, but delivered
Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him
also freely give us all things?”” Rom. 8, 32.

01 om ee

She found Something to do.

A poor, crippled woman, living in a tiny
room on the ground floor of a dingy house,
could only move on her hands and knees,
and had not stood upright for fifteen years:
A lady visiting the sufferer was pitying her
for her inability to do anything in the world.
While she spoke, two merry little children
clattered into the room and seated themselves
by the scrap of fire. +

‘Do these little children belong to you?”
asked the lady.

‘No, ma’am,’” was the reply; “‘they are
my neighbor’s children; she’s just a poor
washer-woman, and I look after her little
ones to set her free to get a job of work.
I can do just that, you see, thank the Lord.”

God knows best what we can do, and all
He asks of us is to do faithfully whatever He
puts into our hand. The crown is for the
one who is faithful, not alone for him who
does the great things in life. eS tel