February 18

That it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater. - Isaiah 55:10.

WHAT would our world be without the snow and the rain from heaven? If God were to make the heavens over us to be as brass, the earth would soon be beneath us as iron. But now see the consequences of these influences-how his paths drop fatness, and how the valleys are made to stand thick with corn; and let us observe how, when these showers come down, the earth brings forth and bears, and gives “seed to the sower and bread to the eater;” that is, furnishes a supply both for present provision and future propagation. Let us see how easily this may be applied to the gospel.

What would any country, town, village, or individual be without the Scriptures? Perishing for lack of knowledge. But when the gospel comes, it brings along with it the living bread, the staff of Spiritual and eternal life. In other words, it brings pardon, friendship with God, the renovation of our natures, all the fruits of the Spirit-which are “joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” And as the husbandman is a sower as well as an eater, so is the Christian. He enjoys the blessings of the gospel himself, but then he is to convey them to others; and the gospel has been preserved and maintained in our world in the same way as the corn-not by miracle but by propagation. The one is by making it the duty of all who have received it to extend and diffuse it, and the other is by making it a privilege to do it; and it does this by producing in them a disposition for it, so that their duty becomes their delight. If we drop a single grain of wheat into the ground, it will yield a number of similar grains. If we sow them also, they will produce many more, so that from one single grain of corn there will be a sufficiency with which to disseminate a furlong, a field, a district, a province, a country, yea, and the globe itself.

Once all Christianity was centered in the Saviour. He imparted it to twelve apostles, and then to seventy disciples, and they to thousands. God says, “I will sow them in the earth:” that is, they shall be the means of producing their like; they shall multiply. “I will cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.” “I will bless them, and they shall be a blessing.”‘