As an additional feature for this meeting prepare as large a book as possible with all the pages white and say, This is your book of the New Year. It is a fresh start for you, There will be nothing written on its pages of white except what you write there. Begin tonight and go straight and keep white. Write over the first page, "In the beginning God." That makes the start right, so it will always be white. Write this on the fresh page of every day also, and you will go straight for the whole year.
43
PUTTING A GOD TO BED
OBJECTS: Three Small Idols
I suppose you have often heard of little girls putting their dollies to bed. Well, here is a story of a full-grown woman by the name of Michal who put her little god to bed.
We read this strange story in the Bible and we will find it written in 1 Samuel 19:13. "And Michal took the image, and laid it in the bed, and put a pillow of goats' hair for his bolster, and covered it with the clothes." But who was this Michal who put her god to bed? She was the wife of King David, and you would have thought she had thrown her idols all away long ago, but she did not do this but continued to put one god to bed long after she had become the wife of a king who believed only in the one true and living God. I suppose she often sang with David her husband, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want," and often with her husband had repeated, "God is our Refuge and our Strength," but with all this she nevertheless put her idol to bed and motherlike, she found herself down on her knees placing the bolster under the head of her idol and carefully covering it with clothes just as mother tenderly tucks in her little baby boy for the night.
Well, after all, I guess she was just like the most of us, she openly confessed her belief in the true God, but on the side had a darling idol or two.
Let us examine ourselves and see if we are putting idols to bed also. Secure three images of Buddha. They can easily be purchased in the shops as they are now sold for incense-holders. The first idol we will label "Irreverence." I am afraid that most all of us have this idol in our possession. We pray to God on Sunday, and then the rest of the week we live any old way. Sometimes when we are in church we whisper, talk, and run about during the service, or look about the room during prayertime, and pay but little attention to the minister who is speaking to us for God. We often pay more attention to our earthly friends than we do to God who is our Chief Friend. All this is a display of Irreverence. Do not let us do this, but put this idol out of our life, and worship the true God only. The best way to cultivate reverence is to go to God's house and learn how to worship him. The music, the message, and the holy surroundings of the place of prayer all make it easy for us to be reverent.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said he had a tender little plant in his heart which he called "Reverence," which he needed to water once a week to keep it fresh and fragrant, so he went to church to water that plant; there he came under the showers of blessing which God sends to his people who are reverent and worship him. Reverence grows fast when we go to church. After you have said this, put the idol in an old bag which you have made to hold cast-off things.