Midway Church of Christ

At the Battle of Manassas, to steady his wavering forces, General Bee exclaimed: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” From that day ’til this that fearless soldier has been known as Stonewall Jackson.

From the summit of Signal Mountain near Chattanooga, hastening to relieve the beleaguered Federal forces in that city, General Grant had this inquiry flagged to General George B. Thomas, the commander there: “How long can you hold your position?” The prompt reply was: “We’ll stay till we starve.” How we wish such sentiment and such devotion would be manifested by all the soldiers of Jesus Christ.

We should always remember the words of the apostle Paul, “….and having done all to stand.” In a noon-day prayer meeting in Philadelphia, the preacher said to a group of young men, as a final message, “Tell them to stand up for Jesus, and now let us sing a hymn.” A few hours later he left his study to visit a scene where machinery was in action. The sleeve of his coat became entangled and his arm was torn from its socket, resulting in his death. George Duffield took the words of that last message and wrote the song which has great meaning to the Christian soldiers and appears in many hymnals: “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus.”

Psalm 90 begins, “Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou
art God.

The solemnity of this psalm should cause us to give thought to “our dwelling place” our spiritual home, our secure shelter and eternal habitation with God. We are unable to correctly portray the words, “eternity” and “everlasting,” We think in terms of generations, lifetimes, centuries — all just moments in eternity. The beloved song, “AMAZING GRACE”, has a verse that says, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.”

Perhaps mountains are our best understanding of something stable and eternal. We are always amazed and humbled as we stand in their midst, yet God was before each mountain and will be after each is gone.

All things except God had a beginning. When time is no more, God’s morning will break eternal. The duration of “eternity” is beyond our ability to grasp, but faith accepts those things which we cannot conceive. We can, by faith, obey the exhortation of the song which bids us “hold to God’s unchanging hand.”

One of the things that Jesus stressed in the model prayer He taught His disciples was “Give us this day our daily bread.” This suggests a number of positive lessons.

The thought of “daily bread” coming from God illustrates the faithfulness in providing for our needs each day. He not only has not promised a full storehouse for the future, but only the necessities of today.

There is also a great deal of faith involved in the receipt of “daily bread.” Because God has fulfilled His promise to see us safely through in this day, we are confident that when tomorrow becomes today, God will be present.

However, the lesson I would like to underscore has to do with our use of time. It is easy to make great promises concerning future work or growth while we continue to live unproductive lives in the present. This is dishonest since we end up cheating God out of the only time we have…the present. In this day, God is interested in neither the past (for which we can repent but which cannot be relived), nor the future (which we do not yet possess), but in the present. As God provides bread daily, so we must live daily for Him.