And he believed in the Lord; and He counted it to him for
righteousness. And He said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the
Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I
know that I shall inherit it? (Gen. 15:6-8).
God’s people often are impetuous, and through want of
understanding His dealings do not bear the fruit of patience; they would, in their haste,
have things at once, for which their heavenly Father, in His wisdom, sees fit to keep them
waiting. The spirit of such is too much that of the world, whose saying is, "A bird
in the hand is worth two in the bush." But the Christian, in communion with God,
knows that it is better to lack in the present time the portion that the world covets,
that in the eternal future he may possess that which shall never pass away. The Spirit of
God calls Esau a profane person (Heb. 12:16), because, by selling his birthright for a
mess of pottage, he showed that he esteemed a meal in the present worth more than
God’s inheritance with its promised blessing in the future. There are many who
follow Esau’s example now-a-days; and we do well to ask ourselves, Have the glorious
realities of eternity so laid hold of my soul that, compared with them, all beside is
insignificant? If God gave me the choice today of an earthly inheritance, or a heavenly
one, which would I choose?
If some of us had been in Abraham’s place, we should not have
liked to wait four hundred years before the promise was fulfilled; nor to hear that for
all those centuries the promised land should be possessed by the enemy, and our children
meanwhile be afflicted in a land that was not theirs. But Abraham’s faith is not
perturbed. He knows that He who gave him the land will secure it to him; and as he trusted
God to give him the children to possess it, he can also trust Him to take care of those
children.
Herbert Wilbraham Taylor (1847-1899) possessed a heart for the Gospel
and a love for perishing souls. He visited many of the large towns of England preaching
the Gospel with great power. He was a great open-air preacher; it was his great joy to
preach in the market places. He wrote a large number of tracts and many small Gospel
booklets.