Then there is the story of the spring whose waters had certain medicinal properties so that those who drank from it were helped in various infirmities. In the course of time, homes sprang up around the spring – then came a hotel, stores, and eventually a town that grew into a city. But there came a day when visitors would ask, “Where is the spring from which this grew?” and the residents would say, with embarrassment, “We are sorry, but somehow in the midst of all our progress and improvement, we lost the spring.” Institutional Christianity’s biggest problem today is to find its lost spring.
Devotion of the Day
Not Now But Afterwards
What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.
John 13:7
Our Lord’s saying goes deeper than the immediate application of this precious word. God trusts some of His saints in the dark. To some He allows chapters that defy all explanation, that do not make sense, that seem to contradict all we have been taught to expect. From some He seems to withdraw His presence; some He lets pass from this world in strange and sinister ways. We must never make too much of deathbed stories, for some choice saints have had anything but a shouting exit.
We must take account of this, for all lives do not follow the ocurse we would have anticipated. Paul dropped from height to depth in the same chapter (II Cor. 12), from third heaven to thorn in the flesh, and God may give us along with a mountain-top vision a dark valley where deliverance is not granted.
Some chapters are to be experienced now and understood hereafter. It is well to be forewarned about them and forearmed for them, even if they do not come, lest Satan overwhelm us as he sought to do with Job and Peter.
God marks across some of our days, “Will explain later.”