MUSINGS

HIDING AND SHOWING It says of John the baptist that “he was in the deserts until the day of his showing to Israel”, Luke 1: 80. It is part of God’s ways, and in His wisdom, that He hides and prepares what He is later to show. It was so with Moses, David, and Paul (see Galatians 1: 17, 18). Uniquely was it so with the Lord Jesus in those hidden thirty years.

If there is to be anything with us that God can ‘show’—can bring forward in testimony and witness before men, or use to demonstrate the truth by way of formation among His people, it can only be as there is a preceding, and accompanying, secret life of communion and experience before God. So let us accept the desert. God allows many things to make us realise that it is a desert through which we are passing. In the acceptance of that there is much blessing, as our roots go down, not into this world, but into our own true soil. How well worth while it is to be “in the deserts” to find that God is there, with the fulness of His resource and blessing. As Mr. Darby’s hymn says—

‘In the desert God will teach thee,

What the God that thou hast found’.

FCM

Published by F. C. Mutton, 22 Christchurch Road, Ilford, Essex, IG1 4QY, England Printed by C. Ellis, Billericay, Essex, England