“A Son is given” (Isaiah 9:6, 7).

A Son is given who will bear the government on His shoulder. His name is Wonderful, Counsellor. He is the Everlasting Father. He is the Prince of Peace. Thus the prophet goes on progressively. Truth and grace blend perfectly in Him. Grace makes truth bearable. Some men who are truthful are very hard. But our God is full of truth and grace. John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” He is going to bear the burden of the whole universe. He is going to bear the responsibility for the sin of all mankind. He is going to take on Himself the punishment of sin, and thus free man for the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. Sin is the sickness that prevents man from enjoying the higher life in Jesus Christ. The cross is going to release us from our sin and from our sinful nature.

Jesus, who bears our sin and prepares us for the school of the Holy Spirit, is the burden-bearer of the whole world. When we utter the name of Jesus, the gates of hell will not prevail against us. Every prayer in this Name will reach God. It is the “Open Sesame” to the treasuries of heaven when it is uttered with a pure heart and a clean conscience. Treasures of counsel from the store of the wisdom of God are opened to us. He is a counsellor.

2 Chron. 9:23: “And all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom, that God had put in his heart.” All the kings of the earth came to him who was taught of God. 2 Chron. 9:3,4: “And when the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon, and the house that he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel; his cup-bearers also and their apparel; and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord; there was no more spirit in her.” She had nothing more to say. She could only wonder at his wisdom.

Jesus is a wonderful counsellor who counsels you and me. “A greater than Solomon is He.” Jesus is the perfect counsellor who can never mislead you. Blessed are those who seek His counsel every day. Pr. 8:34: “Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates.” Grace and truth have kissed each other in Him. The great and mighty God whose voice caused the Israelites to quake with terror is now appearing in the form of grace and truth. There is never an error in His counsel. His voice does not strike terror in anyone. He is full of love. Jesus changes your heart and fills you with love. His government will increase. Nothing can stop it. Will you be a member of that government? If so, you will also increase. Will you be a part of that kingdom that spreads His light and love? Will you work for that kingdom? Then you will not be just a creature of time. You will be an eternal being. God will reveal Himself to you in Jesus. They that do know their God will be strong and do great exploits. Daniel 11:32: “And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.” You will do mighty things because your strength is not yours but the Almighty’s. You will be meek and humble and gentle and yet almighty. This is divine nature. You will share all His qualities including His almightiness.

—N. Daniel

Can you imagine what it would be like to celebrate Christmas in secret? No tree, no decorations, no carol service.

Twenty-one-year-old Nava [not her real name] is an isolated believer from a Muslim background from Iran, who celebrated Christmas for the first time ... [in 2017].

“From the outside, it was nothing special,” she recalls. “It was just me, my mother and my little brother sitting at the dinner table, like we do each night. But this night, somehow automatically, I put down a fourth plate: for Jesus.”

Nava and her family managed to get some Christmas decorations, but they had no gifts to unwrap— no physical ones. “It felt like Jesus was really, physically present. And the gifts He gave us were more precious than anything a human could give.”

That first Christmas night, Nava and her family received “spiritual gifts”, answers to prayer. “My mother was freed from anger issues. My brother, who used to see ghosts in his bedroom, got freed from them when he called on Jesus’ name that night.”

Nava herself, who was romantically involved with a married man, was set free from that relationship. “Since that day I consider myself to be a bride of Christ, and try to live accordingly.”

While that first Christmas was special and passed in safety, Nava knows all too well the dangers of being a Christian and celebrating Jesus’ birth. In Iran, it's illegal to leave Islam, and those who do can receive the death sentence or be imprisoned. Every year at Christmas time, secret house churches are raided.

“I am a young believer, but I have thought the dangers through carefully. I have read other Christians’ testimonies. And yes, I can say wholeheartedly that I am ready to suffer for Christ. The Lord is my ultimate power.” ...

—From Open Doors; see https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/stories/iran-181205/

A lady in London went one day to Paddington Station to bid good-bye to a friend who was leaving the city. After the train pulled out, the lady then proceeded homewards. She boarded a bus, and a moment or two later, the conductor asked for her fare. To her dismay, she found that she had lost her purse. The conductor intimated that she had better alight.

It was a hot morning. She was miles away from home. What was she to do? Turning into Hyde Park, she sat down on a seat. She was in an awkward predicament indeed, but—there was God! She would tell Him about it!

Opening her pocket Testament she carried in her handbag, she read Philippians 4:19: “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”

Her ‘need’ at that moment was six pence. She closed her eyes, and in the Name of Jesus claimed the promise; immediately she had the assurance that her need would be supplied. How, she did not know, and that did not matter—God knew!

She began to trace letters on the gravel with her umbrella. She traced the text, “God is love.” As she was writing the last letter ‘e’, her umbrella point turned up a sixpence! Her heart gave a big thump! Her need was supplied! And she bowed her head and thanked God.

She rose and hastened to catch a bus. When the conductor asked for her fare, she gave him the sixpence. He examined it closely.

“It's all right,” she explained, “It has been buried in the ground. I lost my purse and needed sixpence to take me home. I asked my Heavenly Father to send it to me, and He did. I was writing in the gravel in Hyde Park, God is Love, and my umbrella turned up this coin.”

The conductor looked astounded. “I wish,” he remarked, “God would answer me like this! But there! I am not what I used to be; I don't go to any church on Sundays now. I used to sing in our chapel choir at home. I'm married now and we spend my off-Sundays in the park.”

“Oh,” said the lady, “do come back to God. Get right with Him. God is love.”

There was no time to say more. When the bus neared the spot at which the lady was to alight, she whispered to the conductor as she passed on her way out, “Get right with God. I will pray for you.” She kept her promise and prayed daily for the man and his wife.

One morning, some three weeks later, the lady was going to Kilburn by bus. She handed the conductor her fare, without looking at him.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, “are you the lady who has been praying for me?”

In a moment, she recognized the man. “Yes,” she replied, “I am.”

“Oh,” he said, “I am glad to see you. I have not forgotten your story of the sixpence. Best of all, I have got right with God and my wife is now converted. We have taken our little boy to the chapel and dedicated him to God.”

He told the good news with such real joy that the lady’s heart overflowed with gratitude to God.

—Selected

“God, if there be a God”—the whisper was raised, hands held heavenward in the dark of night—“if You will prove to me that You are, and if You will give me peace, I will give You my whole life.” Prayer and promise were breathed out to Him who could not be seen: “I’ll do anything You ask me to do, go where you send me, obey You all my days.” Then Isobel Miller climbed into bed and lay down.

The unsettling

Isobel’s descent on to the “Misty Flats” from the High Way—where man’s face is lifted Godward and he is called upward—had begun after a professor’s remarks. No one believed in the “myths of Genesis” anymore, he had said; anyone who believed in a Heaven, Hell, and the story of Genesis was to raise their hand. Only Isobel and one other student had done so. The Professor had smiled: “Oh, you just believe that because your papa and your mama told you so.”

That day Isobel decided to accept no more theories of life without having personally proved them. Although having seen answers to prayer as a child, she considered herself an agnostic now. And yet the name of Jesus was still as “ointment poured forth” to her, “like a perfume”, she later wrote, “which haunts and calls so that one stops, lifts one’s head and drinks it in wistfully. His name was the sweetest melody I knew and never failed to stir my heart, even though I had ceased to seek Him. His purity and holiness made me hate besmirching things.”

Student, actor, and lover of dance, Isobel’s path wound downwards after her engagement to a young man named Ben. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “Wherefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the darkness: they shall be driven on, and fall therein: for I will bring evil upon them, even the year of their visitation, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:12).

When Isobel learned that Ben was not loyal and would remain unfaithful, she had whispered, “Then we part”. His were the standards of the “Misty Flats”. Yet she had known the Christ and could not be satisfied with less than the ideals He had set her. She was in the “slippery ways of darkness” and sleep departed.

The climax came just before Christmas 1921. In her sleepless desperation, the Tempter came with thoughts of suicide, and she would face the darkest moment of her life. How much heartache she might have been saved if told that God had already laid His Hand on a man to be her husband, one with the same ideals and passion for God’s highest purposes. “But it was necessary,” she later wrote, “that first I drink to the dregs the emptiness of the promises held out by the Misty Flats: only then could I be freed from their lure and subtle call.”

And then a strange thing happened. That day she had read a quote by Dante: In la sua volontade è nostra pace. Isobel had guessed the meaning: In His will is our peace. That sentence wrote itself across the dark of her bedroom. What if there was a God? She had not been in His will. Was that why she had no peace? Then the idea struck her, the prayer and promise to God…

The seeking

Sunshine was pouring into Isobel’s window when she awoke; such deep relaxed peace had not touched her pillow for many days. Peace had come. She had a made a bargain, God had kept His part. Her part was to yield her whole life if He proved Himself. And in the meantime, she could seek Him.

Seek God where? Can a man by searching find out God? Zophar had questioned Job, not believing it possible. Yet there was an outstanding memory in Isobel’s mind of a young man she had once heard say: “I found God through reading His Word.”

So Isobel, knowing the Gospels were accepted as largely authentic records of Christ’s teachings, decided to search for God through Jesus Christ, who is the ordained road to God, to read the Gospels only, to try to do what Jesus said to do, and to pray again.

For about three months after the “bargain”, Isobel did not experience anything extraordinary. Yet one day, at an hour of feeling undone, of wounded pride, of shaking, she prayed: “Oh God, if You are, please give me p—”, and something like an electric current shot through her. It came from above and outside her, and convinced her that there was a force above and beyond her, trying to get in touch. She never prayed if Thou art again.

Yet Isobel’s prayers were still all selfish. God answered them, thus teaching her a lesson that she never forgot: the triumphs of pride and gratified vanity, which He allowed, could never bring peace or happiness. This kind of life would never satisfy her. And that was what God wanted, as if to say: “If this is what you think you want, dear, have some more.” “And He stuffed,” wrote Isobel later, “the froth of life down me.”

Then when Isobel began to attend a Bible class, she came face to face with another professor, one whom she knew instinctively had a personal experience with God. There she met a friend of her father: “Isobel,” he said, “I’m glad to see you here. I’ve been praying for you for some seven years.” His eyes flooded with tears. Isobel was stunned. It was about seven years since she had decided to go in for worldly things. The “yearning in Christ” that lit up the gentleman’s face stirred her to the depths, for her soul still knew periods of agony.

Satisfied and serving

Isobel was fed in the truth of God’s Word. Her feet were once more planted on the High Way, prepared to climb, her face turned Godwards. In the coming years, God would teach Isobel the awareness of His presence, bless her with the counsel of godly Christians, reveal His plans, and extinguish the tapers of the world that still held her. He changed the whole course of Isobel’s life, satisfied her and called her into His service.

—See Isobel Kuhn, By Searching

In a large and populous village in one of the hundreds, or wapentakes [areas], of Yorkshire, England, lived a poor but honest and pious man, whose name was Jonathan. He was an afflic­ted man, and much paralyzed by dis­ease. He had a wife and children, whose chief dependence in life was upon his small earnings. Jo­nathan was patient, industrious, and persevering in his efforts to provide for himself and for his household, all of whom were content with homely fare.

During the time of harvest, while employed in gathering the fruits of the earth, he accidentally slipped from the top of a barley mow, and sprained one or both of his ankles, in consequence of which he was confined to his room and bed for some weeks. It is unne­cessary to state, that, in the meantime, his family must have felt the loss of his weekly labor and income.

His wife, on one occasion, went up­stairs into his room weeping. “What is the matter?” said Jonathan, “what is distressing thee?” “Why, the children are crying for something to eat, and I have nothing to give them,” was the affecting reply. “Hast thou faith in God?” asked Jonathan. “Dost thou be­lieve in His providence, and in His Word? Has He not said, 'Bread shall be given thee, and thy water shall be sure?' (Isaiah 33:16.) Kneel down,” he continued, “at the bedside and pray to God. Tell Him how thy children are circumstanced; that they have no bread; that thou hast nothing wherewith to buy them any; and I will also pray. Who can tell what God may do? He heareth prayer.”

Jonathan and his wife prayed earnestly together; they pleaded the promi­ses of God, and waited the result. Soon after, a person came to the door with a loaf of bread. She came from a house in the immediate neighborhood of Jonathan, the occupier of which was one of several branches of a family who were proprietors of very extensive iron works, carried on in the village where Jonathan lived.

No sooner did the good woman re­ceive the loaf of bread, than she ran to Jonathan to tell him how God had answered their prayer. “Now,” said Jonathan, “before anything else be done, kneel down at the bedside, and return thanks to God for having heard our prayer.” She did so: they praised His name together; and then ate their food with gladness and singleness of heart.

Not many hours elapsed before ano­ther kind interposition of providence presented itself. A second visitor brou­ght them a joint of meat. When this was told Jonathan, he replied to his wife, “Ay! See! God is even better than His word! He promised bread, and He sends flesh in addition. Kneel down, and thank Him again.”

There are no loose threads in the providence of God, no stitches are dropped, no events are left to chance. The great clock of the universe keeps good time, and the whole machinery of Providence moves with unerring punctuality.

—Selected