Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

JONAH:

Or, the Wish to be Thought Important.

HAVE you ever thought about your own wishes? If not, it is very important that you should think often about them, and find out whether they are pleasing to God, or not. For if you were not to fall into any outward sin, yet, if you indulge wrong wishes, they will grieve the Holy Spirit, and harden your heart, and keep you at a distance from God. ever observed a little moth, called the humming-bird hawk moth? The upper wings are a dark brown, and its under wings are yellow. Its body is thick, and large, compared with the size of its wings, and is covered over with feathers that look

B

Have you

like hairs. It flies very fast, and the strange thing is, that it never seems to settle on any flower. The bee, you know, creeps almost into the flower to suck out the honey, and the butterfly sits often for a long time upon it, and spreads out its beautiful wings in the sun. But this little moth draws out the honey from flowers by means of its long trunk, whilst it is hovering over them like a hawk. Now, wrong wishes are very like that little hawk moth; how quickly they come and go, and even if they do not settle in the mind, but only seem to hover about it, still they draw out from it a great deal that is good, just as that moth draws out the honey out of the flower, without settling upon it. This is the reason why many people never pray with earnestness, nd scarcely ever fix their thoughts upona the Word of God, when they read it. Beware, then, my dear reader, of wrong wishes.

It is our happy work to try to help you

on the way to heaven.

We can have "

no

greater joy," than to be the means of bringing you to Jesus, and, therefore, would we point out more fully some of those wrong wishes, against which you must never cease to watch and pray.

The first that we shall choose is the selfish wish, or the wish to be thought important. Jonah's history proves the sin and the danger of such a wish. Every thing, that God does, ought to please us. But Jonah was displeased at God's ways. If you try to find out the reason, you will see, that it was this. Jonah was selfish. He was self-important, and would even have preferred, that thousands of his fellow-creatures should have perished, rather than that he should be thought unimportant. You will remember that God told Jonah to go to Nineveh. He said, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it," (chap. i. 2). But the prophet did not like to go there, and fled to Tarshish from the presence of

the Lord. How foolish and sinful it was to try to escape from God's presence! Adam and Eve hid themselves from God's presence, because they had done wrong, and their consciences made them afraid to meet God-Jonah fled from God's presence, because he did not like to go to Nineveh. But why did he not like to go there? You will perhaps say, "Nineveh was a very great city. It says (iv. 11) that there were in it more than 120,000 persons, who could not distinguish between their right hand and their left. Had the prophet been told to preach the Gospel to them, he would not have been afraid; but he was told to say, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." He must have been afraid." It must indeed have been a solemn thing to carry such a message to a city containing, as it is calculated, 600,000 heathen. Yet, if it be true that Jonah fled from fear, was it not very foolish and sinful in him to do so? What were 600,000 men compared

they could do

But God could

to God? The most that was to destroy the body. do more. For "He is able to destroy both soul and body in hell," (Matthew x. 28). My dear reader, fear God. Never be led by fear of companions to do what is wrong, or not to do what is right; remember what God says, 66 'I, even I, am He that comforteth you; who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man, which shall be made as grass, and forgettest the Lord thy Maker, that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth."

(Isaiah li. 12). fear, that led

Does he him

Yes, you will

But perhaps it was not Jonah to flee to Tarshish. self tell us why he fled? find it in (ch. iv. 2.) Jonah thought within himself, "God tells me to go to Nineveh, and say to them, 'Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.' Perhaps the people of Nineveh will repent, and then God is so gracious and merciful,

« ÎnapoiContinuă »