“Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there.”
Who can estimate fully God’s ways? Prosperity in earthly things, or even in the result of service for Christ, does not always go hand in hand with the soul’s advancement. Who does not know that Padan-aram, Succoth, and Shechem too often detain the steps of Peniel’s faltering, limping prince, and Bethel’s worshipping pilgrim? And yet, blessed be His Name, Bethel’s God follows Bethel’s pilgrim through all his wanderings and mistakes, and never rests until, with light and power breaking in upon his soul, the loved child hears and obeys the voice, “Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there.”
Christian reader, have you never, in the midst of prosperity, had to retire to your closet, and, with quivering lip and well-nigh broken heart, poured out into the ear of Jesus your tale of sorrow, and the humbling acknowledgment of your failure, incompetence, and unworthiness?
Men may have talked of your success, and you may have been tempted to listen to their tale, and at last begun to believe it true; and while contemplating with what you perhaps deemed only a pardonable amount of satisfaction in your work and your success, the forgotten and jealous Hand by whom all was sustained and accomplished permits the real burden to rest upon your shoulders. It was but for a moment, yet it has been sufficient; for who can recognize in the trembling, humbled, sorrowing child of today the self-satisfying, confident servant of yesterday?
Little things—trifles, permitted and retained yesterday—are now brought forth, and another Samuel “hews Agag in pieces before the Lord God in Gilgal.” As someone has sweetly said: “In this moment of softened restoration, ‘the little foxes’ are taken, and a highway made in the desert for the King Himself.”
Is this the end? Oh, no! Others had not detected, it may be, the backsliding so terribly felt by the soul itself; and so, also, others may scarcely notice the renewed and softened glory seen in the face of one whom even Peniel and Mahanaim cannot now satisfy, but who has returned to and dwells at Bethel. And in the enjoyment of it the soul is ready to say, “Let all perish: my prestige among men, my fair name yes, all, Lord, so that this hallowed fellowship with Thee be not broken.”
Allow a fellow-pilgrim and fellow-laborer, who has known a little of Shechem’s trouble and Bethel’s joy, to leave you one result of his brief experience. Distrust yourself, your plans, your efforts, and your successes; habitually think little of yourself before God; and above all things, avoid listening to the praise which even your fellow Christians will pour into your ears. And if you fail in this, better, far better, to relinquish the service which is accompanied with apparent external successes, than carry about a soul dwarfed in its affections and communings, and which has exchanged to its immense loss in time, a low place before God for a high one before men. To the Christian vox populi is never vox Dei.
Thomas John Barnardo was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1845. Converted in 1862, he moved to London to train as a medical missionary. But he was so moved by the plight of homeless children in England that he dedicated his life to their welfare.
In 1867 he founded the East End Juvenile Mission which rapidly expanded into an immense ministry called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes (he obtained medical degrees from the Edinburgh College of Surgeons in 1876 and 1879).
Barnardo’s motto was “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.” Besides providing homes for children, his programs included social and evangelistic centers for working men, a boarding-out system, and an emigration plan under which boys and girls were sent to Canada for training and settlement. During his lifetime Barnardo and his fellow workers rescued and trained almost 60,000 children and otherwise assisted about 250,000.
—Who’s Who in Christian History
This short message was delivered by Barnardo in 1874.