: Sermons on Biblical Characters by Chappell Clovis Gillham - Bible Biography; Sermons American 20th century Christianity

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y public opinion. He was not urged to it, as flabby Herod, "for the sake of those that sat with him." He was urged to it by his own unstained conscience and his sterling manhood.

Or he might have said, "I made the vow, it's true, but I made it under pressure. A great danger was threatening and a man is not to be held responsible for a vow he makes in the presence of danger." Did you ever get frightened when a storm was on and promise God things, and then go back on it? Of course you have. We have been false to one another, some of us. How many of us have been false to God! How far is this old hero ahead of ourselves!

Think of the vows that you have made as members of the church. You have not even fulfilled the vow you made to your groceryman. Some of you have not paid for the clothes that you have on, and never will. Some of you have made pledges to the church and have forgotten them. And just because the church won't sue you, you are going to break the promise that you have made, not simply to men, but to God.

And what have you done with your church vows? You have promised to renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world. Have you kept your vow? You have promised to obediently keep God's holy will and commandments. Have you been honest with God in this matter? You have promised to be subject to the rules of the church and to attend upon its services, and some of you have trampled on those rules flagrantly, openly, knowingly. And remember that when you took that vow it was not a pledge that you made to me. You opened your mouth that day unto the Lord.

And you that are here outside the church, may the lord help you to pay your vows unto the Most High. For there is hardly a single one of you but that at some time has opened your mouth unto the Lord. What about that promise you made to God when you were sick? I do not say you made it into any human ear, but you breathed it in prayer into His ear. What about the promise you made to God by the coffin of your baby? What about the promise of consecration you made by the bedside of your dying mother? May the Lord help us to make this day a pay day. May the Lord give us the courage to say, "I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back."

A CASE OF BLUES--ELIJAH

One day you were reading in the New Testament and you came to that surprising word from James: "Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are." And if you were reading thoughtfully you stared at that sentence in wide-eyed amazement. And then in your heart you said, "It isn't true. Elijah's story doesn't read a bit like mine."

Then you thought of how he came and put his finger in Ahab's face and made that face go white. You thought of how he carried Heaven's key in his pocket for three years and six months. You thought of his lifting the dead boy into life; of his victory on Carmel; of his quiet walk to the little station beyond the Jordan where the Heavenly Limited met him and took him home. And again you felt like saying that James was altogether mistaken.

Now, what was the matter with Elijah? He was not a natural and deliberate pessimist. There are some folks that are, you know. There are some people who study to be pessimistic. They are the "self-appointed inspectors of warts and carbuncles, the self-elected supervisors of sewers and street gutters." They pride themselves on being guides to the Slough of Despond and on holding a pass key to the cave of Giant Despair.

One such woman, being asked how she felt, said, "I feel good to-day. But I always feel the worst when I feel the best because I know how bad I am going to feel when I get to feeling bad again." Two buckets went to a well one day. One sobbed and said, "Oh, me! it breaks my heart to think that however full we go away from the well, we always come back empty." And its companion laughed outright and said, "Why, I was congratulating myself on the fact that however empty we come to the well, we always go away full."

One morning when the world was brimming with spring, two little girls ran out into a garden where the dewdrops and the sunlight and God had wrought the miracle of a hundred full-blown roses. They looked at the lovely scene and one went back and said tearfully, "Oh, mother, the roses are blooming, but there is a thorn for every rose." The other looked and went back singing and said, "Mother, the roses are blooming and there is a rose for every thorn."

No, this man was not a deliberate pessimist. Had he been his name and memory would have rotted long ago, for the men that bless us are the hopeful men, the forward-looking men. I read of a man who was put in jail during the Boer War simply because he was always prophesying disaster. He was a discourager. He refused to see anything hopeful. And a man of that kind ought to be in jail because he is as harmful as a man with the small-pox. "He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who filcheth from me" my sunny outlook, my expectation of the dawn of a to-morrow, "takes that which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed."

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