Daily Devotionals

Devotional: August 22nd

MEMORIALS OF VICTORY

Ye are our glory and our joy, - 1 Thessalonians 2:20

Paul’s name was that of his first convert. He takes it, as I suppose, because it seemed to him such a blessed thing that at the very moment when he began to sow, God helped him to reap. He had gone out to his work, no doubt, with much trembling, with weakness and fear. And lo! here, at once, the fields were white already to the harvest.

Great conquerors have been named from their victories: Africanus, Germanicus, Nelson of the Nile, Napier of Magdala, and the like. Paul names himself from the first victory that God gave him to win; and so, as it were, carries ever at his breast a memorial of the wonder that through him it had been given to preach, and that not without success, amongst the Gentiles " the unsearchable riches of Christ."

That is to say, this man Paul thought of it as his highest honour, and the thing best worthy to be remembered about his life, that God had helped him to help his brethren to know the common Master. Is that your idea of the best thing about a life? What would you like to have for an epitaph on your grave, professing Christian? "He was rich; he made a big business." " He was famous; he wrote books." " He was happy and fortunate." Or, "He turned many to righteousness"? "This man flung away his literary tastes, his home joys, and his personal ambition, and chose as that for which he would live, and by which he would fain be remembered, that he should bring dark hearts to the light in which he and they together walked "?

His name, in its commemoration of his first success, would act as a stimulus to service and to hope. No doubt the Apostle, like the rest of us, had his times of indolence and languor, and his times of despondency when he seemed to have laboured in vain and spent his strength for nought. He had but to name himself to find the antidote to both the one and the other, and in the remembrance of the past to find a stimulus for service for the future, and a stimulus for hope for the time to come. His first convert was to him the first drop that predicts the shower, the first primrose that prophesies the wealth of yellow blossoms and downy green leaves that will fill the woods in a day or two. The first convert "bears in his hand a glass which showed many more." Look at the workmen in the streets trying to get up a piece of the roadway. How difficult it is to lever out the first paving-stone from the compacted mass! But when once it has been withdrawn, the rest is comparatively easy. We can understand Paul’s triumph and joy over this first stone which he had worked out of the strongly cemented wall and barrier of heathenism; and his conviction that having thus made a breach, if it were but big enough to get the end of his lever in, the fall of the whole was only a question of time. I suppose that if the old alchemists had only turned one grain of base metal into gold they might have turned tons, if only they had had the retorts and the appliances with which to do it. And so, what has brought one man’s soul into harmony with God, and given one man the true life, can do the same for all men. In the first fruits we may see the fields whitening to the harvest. Let us rejoice, then, in any little work that God helps us to do, and be sure that if so great be the joy of the first fruits, great beyond speech will be the joy of the ingathering.

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