TO OUR YOUNG PEOPLE

(No. 11)

Paterson, N. J.

November 27, 1949

My dear young friends:

Hearty thanks in behalf of Mrs. Hegeman and myself, for the many kind and thoughtful remembrances extended to us while passing through a season of trials and afflictions. We were favored with a realization of the fact that there were still burden-bearers or suppliants for us in those days of sore and bitter trial. Neither did the Lord deal with us according to our manifold sins and transgressions but carried us safely through a serious operation and brought us home again. And Mrs. Hegeman’s broken arm is also improving rapidly. May the Lord bless these callings or dealings to our hearts, that they might not testify against us in the Day of Judgment.

The Lord was pleased to comfort us most graciously, and assured us through grace that He would again bring us to our loved ones at home. And yesterday we were enabled to preach twice. Thus it was a real Thanksgiving Day.

My dear young friends, has it been a day of Thanksgiving for you? Before you shall ever be able to offer up Thanksgiving, you will first have to know by experience what a prayer day is. It is a blessing that our authorities still proclaim a day for National Thanksgiving. However, it will be a sad thing if it is only kept in an external sense in feasting and with no sincere and true humiliation before God. My young friends, beg earnestly for grace to observe the blessings and benefits of the Lord, because every one of us are travelers toward eternity. A few more weeks and the old year will be past. Another year flown by in which we have experienced days of prosperity and days of adversity. It is again the last month and soon it will be the last hour of the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and forty-nine. The last hour! How many more years shall we live to see the last hours? This question is not out of order, my friends, for our life is passing swiftly away. We are indeed traveling forward unto darkness or unto light, unto death or unto life. Oh, how we live on imagining within ourselves that we are also going to reach an old age. Since we are still young and strong, we do not want to think about death. But, remember, we are confronted with eternal realities. You have a most precious soul created for eternity. In all earnestness, I ask you, my dear reader, what has been our life in this year? And what should it have been? Oh, may the Lord impress it deeply upon your heart, that all earthly pleasures and riches take wings to themselves and fly away. Oh, that we might yet be brought to realize the true need of our immortal soul! Then we do earnestly desire to be favored with that same grace as the Psalmist of Psalm 27 exclaims in verse 8: “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” He had the language of God in his soul, and that is most essential for us too if it shall be well with our soul. For, truly, without that voice of God in our soul we are dead in sin, we are without an advocate to plead our cause, and if we so die then we are lost forever. Oh, that man is truly blessed, who is enabled or prepared to meet God, not in himself, but through grace in Christ..

If the Lord spares us, it will soon be Christmas and then the passing away of the old and the ushering in of a New Year. However, Christmas is first, and therefore, my dear reader, be not deceived. Do not deceive your soul by a false rest. First Christmas, or Bethlehem; Christ first and then rest. That is the only way that it can be a blessed new year for your soul, otherwise it will be one to testify against you. Whether you are pious or devout, these are no grounds, for everything outside of Christ is false.

There was no place for Jesus in the inn. Is there room for Him in thy heart? In our state of nature, we are enemies of Christ. Oh, may you be granted a knowledge of that in your soul. For then you shall cry out, “There is no room in my heart, I am living under the sentence of death.” Nevertheless, the shepherds came unto Jesus. That is grace! Listen to Simeon singing, and Anna prophesying. Truly, the heart of every person that has been brought know the beastly nature of the manger of their own heart, drinketh from the fountain of grace. And it is indeed true that “such fragrant love, should love instil in every heart.”

Dear reader, what is now the true or actual state of your soul, my fellow mortal? Shall you live to see this Christmas and the New Year? Are you positively sure that you will ? Time may be changed to eternity in one moment! Oh that each one of us might be brought to earnestly consider within our heart that sin worketh death, and that everything of the world is stamped with vanity of vanities, it is all vanity. Blessed indeed is every soul that is enabled to write death upon everything that is not of, or outside of Christ.

Do we hear one or more of our readers now saying, within themselves: oh, that I might yet be granted grace thereto! Oh, that I might be granted faith and the true spirit of adoration at Christmas time, but alas, alas, my heart and soul is so insensible, so void, so dead to the reality of Christmas! I know that I have enjoyed better seasons in my life! I have had times when I felt my sin and guilt heavy upon my soul, and had to acknowledge the justice of God, that He was infinitely just if He condemned me! It was in those seasons of my inward soul’s experiences, that God revealed unto me the beastly nature of the manger of my own heart! But, oh, that my soul might now be given or blessed with a true knowledge of that faith in Jesus, so that I might yet indeed believe that Jesus was or is truly born in the manger of my own beastly heart! But, alas, alas, it is indeed possible for everyone else, but not for me!

Beloved, would you know where to obtain sound counsel and a remedy for your malady? It is in Bethlehem. Despair not, poor soul, for at Bethlehem there is an abundance of grace, and God, Himself, shall cause the light to arise and shine forth in His appointed time and way. For, it is only and alone through that One Perfect Light that your soul ever can be and ever shall be led into or rather be enabled to behold the divine mysteries of salvation, in the redemption of the elect sinner by God.

In Bethlehem! Oh, how blessed indeed when we are brought there by the Holy Spirit as a sinner clothed in garments of guilt and shame in our spirit. And, as one that is sorely oppressed, whom the enemy fills with fearful horrors and unmercifully inflicts wound upon wound. Oh, beloved! by the mercy or grace of God, there is salvation, there is comfort, there is life, there is victory and triumph for poor poverty stricken souls, provided in the Grace of God.

Oh, ye fearful, doubting, distressed and har-rassed souls, struggling and wrestling within thy bosom, and not able to believe nor walk steadfastly before God, oh, my dear friends, may the Spirit of the Lord cause you to hear the glad tidings of salvation as it is proclaimed in the Gospel: “Sit still, my daughter, until thou know-est how the matter will fall: for the man will not be in rest, until he have finished the thing this day.” Ruth 3:18. If we are favored of God with such an experience in our soul then it will surely be a blessed Christmas, and our end will be, everlasting joy and peace.

Your ever mindful friend,

at Paterson,

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