Royal Insignia—Blog. no.4.
Royal Insignia, compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, has been a blessing to pastors and Christian workers in various parts the world. It stresses the need for humility. It contains exhortations and testimonies from men and women down through the centuries who have proved the blessings and the necessity of a humble walk before God. Here are quotations from several of these saints:
Lillias Trotter:
“The water begins by grooving that trench at the lowest
level it can find, and it seeks all the time to make that level
lower still, carving for itself at last a veritable ravine till it has
reached the mission that was the meaning of the lonely path,
of the stripping bare of the ever-deepening emptiness. For the
last sweep of its ravine has sent it forth into the glory of its
mission. Away beyond stretched thousands upon thousands
of palm trees, waiting for the treasure that the water course has
brought down. The power of the water and the laying low of
the channel—between them they have opened this great gateway.
‘Thou didst cleave the earth with Thy rivers.’
“So with ourselves, instead of a life of conscious power,
ours will probably, if He is going to do any deep work in us, be
a path of humiliation, of stripping, of emptiness, where no
flesh may glory in His presence.
“The way goes downward and downward into the valley
of humiliation as the self-life stands gradually revealed by
God’s presence! On and on, instead of the sense of power,
there comes only more and more the overwhelming sense of
insufficiency—for in the spiritual, as in the natural world, if
you want to seek water, look in the very lowest place that you
can find. Whatever the ministry may be, it is the same story,
the stream-bed going lower and lower, with nothing to glory
in but the wonderful glory of bearing the life-giving water.
‘Death worketh in us, but life in you,’ the water courses say.
“Yes, the way ‘goes downward and downward,’ while
natural man’s whole tendency is to raise himself in arrogant
pride.” (p. 34).
Frederic Lucian Hosner:
“ By failure and defeat made wise,
We come to know, at length,
What strength within our weakness lies,
What weakness in our strength.
What inward peace is born of strife;
What power of being spent;
What wings unto our upward life
Is noble discontent.
O Lord, we need Thy shaming look
That burns all low desire;
The discipline of Thy rebuke
Shall be refining fire!”
— (p. 30)
Alan Redpath:
I tell you, my friend, if you are a Christian leader, or in the
pulpit, or singing, or teaching a Sunday School class, or if you
are doing anything for the Lord—it isn’t the big shot, the big
man that God wants—it’s the broken man. God uses the man
whom He has crushed until he is nothing but a door mat for
people to walk on in order that they might come to Jesus. . . .
I honestly believe that one of the curses of twentieth
century evangelical Christianity is that we are not destitute.
We’ve become desperately self-sufficient. Indeed, so great is
the craze for higher education that we train young people
today to be self-sufficient, to major in the things in which they
will succeed—to be a big shot.
I’m not saying anything about education. Get the very
best you can, but I want to remind you of what Paul said about
self-sufficiency. Paul was a man of outstanding education, the
brilliant theologian of his day, and he said, “Our sufficiency is
of God.” Two thousand years have gone by and the situation
is no different. Our sufficiency, our help, our hope is not in
programs, not in a theological degree—not in anything but the
Lord! (p. 38).
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.