Self-Caring Ministers
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the advancement you now make, your probation may close before you
have made the determined efforts essential to give you the victory over
self. You will, in the providence of God, be placed in positions where
your peculiarities, if existing, will be tried and revealed. You neither
see nor realize the effect of your thoughtless, impatient, complaining,
whining words.
You and your wife have another golden opportunity to suffer for
Christ’s sake. If you do this complainingly you will have no reward; if
willingly, gladly, having the same spirit which Peter possessed after
his apostasy, you will be victors. He felt a sense of his cowardly denial
of Christ throughout his lifetime; and when called to suffer martyrdom
for his faith, this humiliating fact was ever before him, and he begged
that he might not be crucified in the exact manner in which his Lord
suffered, fearing that it would be too great an honor after his apostasy.
His request was that he might be crucified with his head downward.
What a sense did Peter have of his sin in denying his Lord! What a
conversion he experienced! His life ever after was a life of repentance
and humiliation.
You may have cause to tremble when you see God through His
law. When Moses thus saw the majesty of God, he exclaimed: “I
exceedingly fear and quake.” The law pronounced death upon the
transgressor; then the atoning sacrifice was presented before Moses.
The cleansing blood of Christ was revealed to purify the sinner, and
his fears were swept away, as the morning fog before the beams of
the rising sun. Thus he saw it might be with the sinner. Through
repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, pardon
is written, and the Sun of Righteousness sheds His bright, healing
beams upon him, dispelling the doubt and fear that befog the soul.
Moses came down from the mount where he had been in converse with
God, his face shining with a heavenly luster which was reflected upon
the people. He appeared to them like an angel direct from glory. That
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divine brightness was painful to those sinners; they fled from Moses
and begged that the bright glory might be covered from their sight lest
it slay them if they came near him.
Moses had been a student. He was well educated in all the learning
of the Egyptians, but this was not the only qualification which he
needed to prepare him for his work. He was, in the providence of God,
to learn patience, to temper his passions. In a school of self-denial