“Write while the heat is
in you. When the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he
carries the host iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is
less effectual to penetrate (pierce) it.
It must be used instantly, or it is useless. The writer who postpones
the recording of his
thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame
the minds of his audience.” Henry David Thoreau in his autobiographical
journal I to Myself, Feb 10, 1852. 
“O
man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be
unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong.
And when he had spoken unto me, I was strengthened....” Daniel
10:19
February is the
month
when the western world celebrates the theme of Love, a many splendored thing.
Perhaps in all literature, the soaring grandeur of discovering divine love to
the human soul is unmatched by an angel’s message to the Old Testament prophet
Daniel at a time of crisis in the life of his people, noted in the text above. This
scrap of autobiography of one who lived
and recorded his prophecies six centuries before Christ can be a catalyst for
Christian believers today as they examine their prayer life and surrender their
insecurities, fears and yearnings to the Holy Spirit. While he is yet praying,
Daniel is interrupted
by a messenger of the Lord telling him that from the moment he set his heart to
understand and to chasten himself before God, his words were heard. “I
am come for thy words”, the messenger
said. Here in Holy Script we have
Daniel’s encounter with Christ (per Matthew Henry’s commentary), an answer to
his prayer while earnestly seeking God with his whole heart. Dare we believe
that God will do or has done
that for us also? Notice Daniel’s prayer
posture at this moment: ‘then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face
toward the ground’ when the angel spoke.
James S. Stewart suggests moments such as this with Daniel are common to
all when God is speaking to us:
“If ever
you have been moved, in some great hour of
the fulfilment of heart’s desire; if ever, when some hope of years lay ruined,
there spoke a still small voice; ...if ever a word in a hymn, or prayer, or
sermon has been to you the opening of a window towards Jerusalem; if ever a
memory of home, or someone’s trust and affection, or the eyes of a little
child, or some strange thoughts of a green hill far away and a cross against
the skyline, have held honor securely upon the throne of your life in a day
when honor is threatened;....if ever there has fallen across your path some
gleam of light that was never on sea or land – then I beg you, give that
experience its due name....Call it the revelation of God, and you will be
gloriously right!”
(James S. Stewart in The Gates of New Life.)
With
Daniel, it was a matter of being sensitive to the presence of God in the
manifest ways He has to awaken us to His presence and caring love. .
Approver's Choice
The
highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can
ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the
person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls
his Father. There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation
of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its
immensity; so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we
can compass and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go
our way with the thought, "Behold I am wise." But when we come to
this master-science, finding that our plumb-line cannot sound its depth, and
that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought, that
vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass's colt; and with the solemn
exclamation, "I am but of yesterday, and know nothing." Charles
Hadden Spurgeon
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