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Last Updated on :
Saturday, November 22, 2014

 

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CONTENTS

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Letters To The Elect Of God
In A Time of Trouble

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THE ELECT DEFINED

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Again, greetings in the Lord. You will not always be in trouble: It will last only so long as may be necessary for the accomplishment of God's purpose in sending it. "Weeping may endure for a night: but joy cometh in the morning." Weeping means sorrow of heart. "Ye now therefore have sorrow," but "blessed are ye that weep now -- ye shall be comforted." In this, be sustained in the assurance of grace, mercy and peace from God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

THE ELECT DEFINED

 

BELOVED --

When I wrote the first letter, I had not thought of writing a second, and when I wrote the second, still less did I think of writing a third. But the writings of one seemed to leave echoes ringing through the mental chamber that would not cease till they found expression. I have thought you might not unfavourably receive a third, in view of the way some have spoken of the first and second. And it is a relief to my own mind thus to speak in the abstract to those whom, for the moment, I think of only as the spotless elect of God, passing agonisingly through the tribulation which is preparing them for joyful entrance into the kingdom of God.

We live in a state of things so evil upon the earth that the very term "elect" has become a test. The word dies on the lips of most of those who try to pronounce it seriously. It is associated in modern flippancy with Mormon imposture, sour-faced, tippling Scotch Calvinism, and moral imbecilities and hideousness of all sorts. It belongs in refined estimation to the cant of hypocrisy, the twaddle of benighted sectarianism, or the shallow conceited evangelical mediocrity, pining and dying of moral diabetes. But it represents a noble reality for all that.

The elect have not ceased out of the universe because their name is no longer pronounced upon earth by the pure lips of the Son of God. They may have become as few as the eight souls among the population that were pitilessly drowned in Noah's 600th year by the flood; and they may be regarded with a contempt as unfeigned as that with which Noah's expectations and workmanship on the ark were undoubtedly looked upon by the stalwart men and fair women to whom he was vainly a preacher of righteousness. But the noble family whom the term "the elect" defines, are nevertheless a reality in the history of the past, and a not entirely extinct fact in the present, when there is a providential needs-be for their existence contemporaneously with the sixth vial, under which they are the blessed "watchers" for whom awaits the honor of escape from the common lot of man: (for "we shall not all sleep").

They are styled the elect because, prospectively, they are the chosen of God: and they are chosen because of their faith and obedience, because they have become enlightened in the word of revelation: and they have become enlightened in this, because God has sent it forth as His power to save, and endowed them with the capacity to receive it and bring forth fruit unto His glory and their own salvation.

To them, you belong, by the working out of this line of things: and for this cause I write, that we may be comforted, in times of evil, by "the mutual faith, both of you and me."

 


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