“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep” (Ps. 107:23, 24).

He is but an apprentice and no master in the art, who has not learned that every wind that blows is fair for Heaven.  The only thing that helps nobody, is a dead calm. North or south, cast or west, it matters not, every wind may help towards that blessed port.  Seek one thing only: keep well out to sea, and then have no fear of stormy winds.  Let our prayer be that of an old Cornishman: “O Lord, send us out to sea–out in the deep water.  Here we are so close to the rocks that the first bit of breeze with the devil, we are all knocked to pieces. Lord, send us out to sea–out in the deep water, where we shall have room enough to get a glorious victory.”–Mark Guy Pearse.
 

Remember that we have no more faith at any time than we have in the hour of trial. All that will not bear to be tested is mere carnal confidence. Fair-weather faith is no faith.–C. H. Spurgeon

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“And he went out carrying his own cross” (John 19:17).

There is a poem called “The Changed Cross.”  It represents a weary one who thought that her cross was surely heavier than those of others whom she saw about her, and she wished that she might choose an other instead of her own.  She slept, and in her dream she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of different shapes and sizes.  There was a little one most beauteous to behold, set in jewels and gold.  “Ah, this I can wear with comfort,” she said.  So she took it up, but her weak form shook beneath it.  The jewels and the gold were beautiful, but they were far too heavy for her.

Next she saw a lovely cross with fair flowers entwined around its sculptured form.  Surely that was the one for her.  She lifted it, but beneath the flowers were piercing thorns which tore her flesh.

At last, as she went on, she came to a plain cross, without jewels, without carvings, with only a few words of love inscribed upon it.  This she took up and it proved the best of all, the easiest to be borne.  And as she looked upon it, bathed in the radiance that fell from Heaven, she recognized her own old cross.  She had found it again, and it was the best of all and lightest for her.
 
God knows best what cross we need to bear.  We do not know how heavy other people’s crosses are.  We envy someone who is rich; his is a golden cross set with jewels, but we do not know how heavy it is.  Here is another whose life seems very lovely.  She bears a cross twined with flowers.  If we could try all the other crosses that we think lighter than our own, we would at last find that not one of them suited us so well as our own.–Glimpses through Life’s Windows

If thou, impatient, dost let slip thy cross,
Thou wilt not find it in this world again;
Nor in another: here and here alone
Is given thee to suffer for God’s sake.

In other worlds we may more perfectly
Love Him and serve Him, praise Him,
Grow nearer and nearer to Him with delight.
But then we shall not any more
Be called to suffer, which is our appointment here.

Canst thou not suffer, then, one hour or two?
If He should call thee from thy cross today,
Saying: “It is finished-that hard cross of thine

From which thou prayest for deliverance,
” Thinkest thou not some passion of regret
Would overcome thee? Thou would’st say,
“So soon? Let me go back and suffer yet awhile
More patiently. I have not yet praised God.”

Whensoe’er it comes, that summons that we look for,
It will seem soon, too soon. Let us take heed in time
That God may now be glorified in us.
–Ugo Bassi’s Sermon in a Hospital.

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“There he proved them” (Exod. 15:25).

I stood once in the test room of a great steel mill.  All around me were little partitions and compartments.   teel had been tested to the limit, and marked with figures that showed its breaking point.  Some pieces had been twisted until they broke, and the strength of torsion was marked on them.  Some had been stretched to the breaking point and their tensile strength indicated.  Some had been compressed to the crushing point, and also marked.  The master of the steel mill knew just what these pieces of steel would stand under strain.  He knew just what they would bear if placed in the great ship, building, or bridge.  He knew this because his testing room revealed it.

It is often so with God’s children.  God does not want us to be like vases of glass or porcelain.  He would have us like these toughened pieces of steel, able to bear twisting and crushing to the uttermost without collapse.

He wants us to be, not hothouse plants, but storm-beaten oaks; not sand dunes driven with every gust of wind, but granite rocks withstanding the fiercest storms.  To make us such He must needs bring us into His testing room of suffering.

Many of us need no other argument than our own experiences to prove that suffering is indeed God’s testing room of faith.–J. H. McC

It is very easy for us to speak and theorize about faith, but God often casts us into crucibles to try our gold, and to separate it from the dross and alloy.  Oh, happy are we if the hurricanes that ripple life’s unquiet sea have the effect of making Jesus more precious.  Better the storm with Christ than smooth waters without Him.–Macduff

What if God could not manage to ripen your life without suffering?

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“Shut up to faith” (Gal. 3:23).

God, in olden time suffered man to be kept in ward by the law that he might learn the more excellent way of faith.  For by the law he would see God’s holy standard and by the law he would see his own utter helplessness; then he would be glad to learn God’s way of faith.
 
God still shuts us up to faith.  Our natures, our circumstances, trials, disappointments, all serve to shut us up and keep us in ward till we see that the only way out is God’s way of faith.  Moses tried by self-effort, by personal influence, even by violence, to bring about the deliverance of his people.  God had to shut him up forty years in the wilderness before he was prepared for God’s work.

Paul and Silas were bidden of God to preach the Gospel in Europe.  They landed and proceeded to Philippi.  They were flogged, they were shut up in prison, their feet were put fast in the stocks.  They were shut up to faith.  They trusted God.  They sang praises to Him in the darkest hour, and God wrought deliverance and salvation.

John was banished to the Isle of Patmos.  He was shut up to faith.  Had he not been so shut up, he would never have seen such glorious visions of God.

Dear reader, are you in some great trouble?  Have you had some great disappointment, have you met some sorrow, some unspeakable loss?  Are you in a hard place?  Cheer up! You are shut up to faith.  Take your trouble the right way.  Commit it to God.  Praise Him that He maketh “all things work together for good,” and that “God worketh for him that waiteth for him.”  There will be blessings, help and revelations of God that will come to you that never could otherwise have come; and many besides yourself will receive great light and blessing because you were shut up to faith.–C. H. P

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet,
These are not done by jostling in the street.”

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert) 

“He went out, not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:9).

It is faith without sight.  When we can see, it is not faith, but reasoning.  In crossing the Atlantic we observed this very principle of faith.  We saw no path upon the sea, nor sign of the shore.  And yet day by day we were marking our path upon the chart as exactly as if there had followed us a great chalk line upon the sea.  And when we came within twenty miles of land, we knew where we were as exactly as if we had seen it all three thousand miles ahead.

How had we measured and marked our course?  Day by day our captain had taken his instruments and, looking up to the sky, had fixed his course by the sun.  He was sailing by the heavenly, not the earthly lights.

So faith looks up and sails on, by God’s great Sun, not seeing one shore line or earthly lighthouse or path upon the way.  Often its steps seem to lead into utter uncertainty, and even darkness and disaster; but He opens the way, and often makes such midnight hours the very gates of day. Let us go forth this day, not knowing, but trusting.–Days of Heaven upon Earth

“Too many of us want to see our way through before starting new enterprises.  If we could and did, from whence would come the development of our Christian graces?  Faith, hope and love cannot be plucked from trees, like ripe apples.  After the words ‘In the beginning’ comes the word ‘God’!  The first step turns the key into God’s power-house, and it is not only true that God helps those who help themselves, but He also helps those who cannot help themselves.  You can depend upon Him every time.”

“Waiting on God brings us to our journey’s end quicker than our feet.”

The opportunity is often lost by deliberation.

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“And the rest, some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass that they escaped all safe to land” (Acts 27:44).

The marvelous story of Paul’s voyage to Rome, with its trials and triumphs, is a fine pattern of the lights and shades of the way of faith all through the story of human life. The remarkable feature of it is the hard and narrow places which we find intermingled with God’s most extraordinary interpositions and providences.
 
It is the common idea that the pathway of faith is strewn with flowers, and that when God interposes in the life of His people, He does it on a scale so grand that He lifts us quite out of the plane of difficulties.  The actual fact, however, is that the real experience is quite contrary.  The story of the Bible is one of alternate trial and triumph in the case of everyone of the cloud of witnesses from Abel down to the latest martyr.

Paul, more than anyone else, was an example of how much a child of God can suffer without being crushed or broken in spirit.  On account of his testifying in Damascus, he was hunted down by persecutors and obliged to fly for his life. but we behold no heavenly chariot transporting the holy apostle amid thunderbolts of flame from the reach of his foes, but “through a window in a basket,”was he let down over the walls of Damascus and so escaped their hands.  In an old clothes basket, like a bundle of laundry, or groceries, the servant of Jesus Christ was dropped from the window and ignominiously fled from the hate of his foes.
 
Again we find him left for months in the lonely dungeons; we find him telling of his watchings, his fastings, and his desertion by friends, of his brutal and shameful beatings, and here even after God has promised to deliver him, we see him for days left to toss upon a stormy sea, obliged to stand guard over the treacherous seaman, and at last when the deliverance comes, there is no heavenly galley sailing from the skies to take off the noble prisoner; there is no angel form walking along the waters and stilling the raging breakers; there is no supernatural sign of the transcendent miracle that is being wrought; but one is compelled to seize a spar, another a floating plank, another to climb on a fragment of the wreck, another to strike out and swim for his life.

Here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this every day world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.

God’s promises and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our every day experience.–Hard Places in the Way of Faith

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“I believe God, that it shall be even as it was told me” (Acts 27:25).

I went to America some years ago with the captain of a steamer, who was a very devoted Christian. When off the coast of Newfoundland he said to me, “The last time I crossed here, five weeks ago, something happened which revolutionized the whole of my Christian life. We had George Mueller of Bristol on board. I had been on the bridge twenty-four hours and never left it. George Mueller came to me, and said, “Captain I have come to tell you that I must be in Quebec Saturday afternoon.” “It is impossible,” I said. “Very well, if your ship cannot take me, God will find some other way. I have never broken an engagement for fifty-seven years. Let us go down into the chart-room and pray.”
 
I looked at that man of God, and thought to myself, what lunatic asylum can that man have come from? I never heard of such a thing as this. “Mr. Mueller,” I said, “do you know how dense this fog is?” “No,” he replied, “my eye is not on the density of the fog, but on the living God, who controls every circumstance of my life.”

He knelt down and prayed one of the most simple prayers, and when he had finished I was going to pray; but he put his hand on my shoulder, and told me not to pray. “First, you do not believe He will answer; and second I BELIEVE HE HAS, and there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.”

I looked at him, and he said, “Captain, I have known my Lord for fifty-seven years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to get audience with the King. Get up, Captain and open the door, and you will find the fog gone.” I got up, and the fog was indeed gone. On Saturday afternoon, George Mueller was in Quebec for his engagement.–Selected

“If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine,
In the sweetness of our Lord.”

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert) 

“Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab. 3:17, 18).

Observe, I entreat you, how calamitous a circumstance is here supposed, and how heroic a faith is expressed. It is really as if he said, “Though I should be reduced to so great extremity as not to know where to find my necessary food, though I should look around about me on an empty house and a desolate field, and see the marks of the Divine scourge where I had once seen the fruits of God’s bounty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.”

Methinks these words are worthy of being written as with a diamond on a rock forever. Oh, that by Divine grace they might be deeply engraven on each of our hearts! Concise as the form of speaking in the text is, it evidently implies or expresses the following particulars: That in the day of his distress he would fly to God; that he would maintain a holy composure of spirit under this dark dispensation, nay, that in the midst of all he would indulge in a sacred joy in God, and a cheerful expectation from Him. Heroic confidence! Illustrious faith! Unconquerable love!–Doddridge.

Last night I heard a robin singing in the rain,
And the raindrop’s patter made a sweet refrain,
Making all the sweeter the music of the strain.

So, I thought, when trouble comes, as trouble will,
Why should I stop singing? Just beyond the hill
It may be that sunshine floods the green world still.

He who faces the trouble with a heart of cheer
Makes the burden lighter. If there falls a tear,
Sweeter is the cadence in the song we hear.

I have learned your lesson, bird with dappled wing,
Listening to your music with its lilt of spring
When the storm-cloud darkens, then’s the TIME to sing.

–Eben E. Rexford

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)

“When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was” (John 11:6).

In the forefront of this marvelous chapter stands the affirmation, “Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus,” as if to teach us that at the very heart and foundation of all God’s dealings with us, however dark and mysterious they may be, we must dare to believe in and assert the infinite, unmerited, and unchanging love of God.  Love permits pain.  The sisters never doubted that He would speed at all hazards and stay their brother from death, but, “When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was.”
 
What a startling “therefore”!  He abstained from going, not because He did not love them, but because He did love them.  His love alone kept Him back from hasting at once to the dear and stricken home.  Anything less than infinite love must have rushed instantly to the relief of those loved and troubled hearts, to stay their grief and to have the luxury of wiping and stanching their tears and causing sorrow and sighing to flee away.  Divine love could alone hold back the impetuosity of the Savior’s tender-heartedness until the Angel of Pain had done her work.

Who can estimate how much we owe to suffering and pain?  But for them we should have little scope for many of the chief virtues of the Christian life.  Where were faith, without trial to test it; or patience, with nothing to bear; or experience, without tribulation to develop it?–Selected

“Loved! then the way will not be drear;
For One we know is ever near,
Proving it to our hearts so clear
That we are loved.

“Loved when our sky is clouded o’er,
And days of sorrow press us sore;
Still we will trust Him evermore,
For we are loved.

“Time, that affects all things below,
Can never change the love He’ll show;
The heart of Christ with love will flow,
And we are loved.”

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert) 

“And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me” (John 11:41).

This is a very strange and unusual order.  Lazarus is still in the grave, and the thanksgiving precedes the miracle of resurrection.  I thought that the thanksgiving would have risen when the great deed had been wrought, and Lazarus was restored to life again.  But Jesus gives thanks for what He is about to receive.  The gratitude breaks forth before the bounty has arrived, in the assurance that it is certainly on the way.  The song of victory is sung before the battle has been fought. It is the sower who is singing the song of the harvest home.  It is thanksgiving before the miracle!

Who thinks of announcing a victory-psalm when the crusaders are just starting out for the field?  Where can we hear the grateful song for the answer which has not yet been received?  And after all, there is nothing strange or forced, or unreasonable in the Master’s order.  Praise is really the most vital preparatory ministry to the working of the miracles.  Miracles are wrought by spiritual power.  Spiritual power is always proportioned to our faith.–Dr. Jowett

Praise Changes Things

Nothing so pleases God in connection with our prayer as our praise, and nothing so blesses the man who prays as the praise which he offers.  I got a great blessing once in China in this connection.  I had received bad and sad news from home, and deep shadows had covered my soul.  I prayed, but the darkness did not vanish.  I summoned myself to endure, but the darkness only deepened.  Just then I went to an inland station and saw on the wall of the mission home these words: “Try Thanksgiving.”  I did, and in a moment every shadow was gone, not to return.  Yes, the Psalmist was right, “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord.”–Rev. Henry W. Frost

(From Charles E Cowman Devotionals – Streams in the Desert)