The Chocolate Soldier (11)

The following text was written by Charles Studd (1860 - 1931), a british missionary who served the Lord in China, India and Africa. The thoughts are to be enjoyed with a certain caution and with some humor. Nevertheless, God can use them to touch our hearts:

THE TEN SPIES WERE CHOCOLATES. They melted and ran over the whole congregation of Israel, turning them into CHOCOLATE CREAMS—"softies", afraid to face the fire and water before them. God put them all into the saucepan again and boiled them for forty years in the desert, and left them there. 

He has no use for Chocolates. It's not small things He despises, but "Chocolates"; for He said, "Your little ones shall inherit the promised land which you have forfeited through listening to men and despising Me" (Numbers 13).

JONAH became a Chocolate Soldier once. Told to go to Africa, he went to Liverpool and took ship for America. Luckily he met a storm and a whale which, after three days' instruction, taught him how to pray and obey, and set him once again on the right track (Jonah 1).

There's nothing that shows up Chocolates so much as a bit of a breeze among God's people. Paul and Barnabas had one once. Judging from experience, I guess there were some Chocolates about then who got into a fog right away!

Before that, they had vowed they would go to the heathen; but this breeze between P. and B. put them off. If they hadn't been MADE OF CHOCOLATE they would have said, "This affair between Paul and Barnabas only makes it more necessary for me to keep close to God, and do what He told me to do more exactly and punctually; so I shall go a bit sooner to Africa—that's all!"

Difficulties, dangers, disease, death, or divisions don't deter any but Chocolates from executing God's Will. When someone says there's a lion in the way, the real Christian promptly replies, "That's hardly enough inducement for me; I want a bear or two besides to make it worth my while to go."

C.T.S.