DEUTERONOMY viii. 11-20.
"Beware ... lest when thou hast eaten and art full ... thine heart be
lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God." I was in a little cottage
near Warwick. I said to the good man who lived in it, "Can you see the
castle?" and he replied, "We can see it best in the winter when the leaves
are off the trees. In the summer time it is apt to be hid!" The summer
bounty hid the castle; the winter barrenness revealed it! And so it is in
life. In the season of fulness we are prone to be blind to "the house of
many mansions," and we forget the Master of the house, the Lord our God.
Our material wealth hides our eternal treasure.
What, then, shall we do in the days of our prosperity, when all our trees
are in full leaf? We must pray that material things may never become
opaque, that they may be always transparent, so that through the seen we
may behold the unseen. This is a gift of the Spirit, and it may be ours.
He will anoint our eyes with the eye-salve of grace, and everything will
become to us a symbol of something better, so that even in the midst of
material plenty our hearts will be with our treasure in heaven. Everything
will be to us "as it were transparent glass."
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John Henry Jowett was born in Halifax, England in 1864. Jowett's father had arranged for him to begin working as a clerk for a lawyer in Halifax, but the encouragement of his Sunday school teacher, Mr. Dewhirst, turned Jowett's heart toward the ministry.
After theological training at Edinburgh and Oxford, Jowett assumed the pastorate of the Saint James Congregational Church. His six effective years of ministry brought him to the attention of the Carr's Lane Church in Birmingham, England, on the death of their pastor. For the next fifteen years the church grew and prospered. Their pastor's vision led them to increase their efforts to bring people to Christ. In 1917, the mayor of Birmingham said the church had changed the town with "crime and drunkenness having decreased."
Jowett came to America for the first time in 1909 to address the Northfield Conference founded by D. L. Moody. While in America he preached twice at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York. The church immediately asked him to come as its pastor. Jowett refused, having received a petition, signed by more than 1,400 members of his church in England, begging him to stay. The Fifth Avenue Church called him again, and then a third time. Finally Jowett concluded that this was God's leading for his life. He assumed the pastorate in 1911.
Although his preaching style was not dynamic (he read all of his sermons), the depth of his knowledge, the clarity of his language, and the power of his life commanded respect. Attendance at the church which had dropped to 600 on Sunday morning rose to 1,500. Lines up to half a block long formed, waiting for unclaimed seats. Jowett began preparing his Sunday sermons on Tuesday, following a meticulously detailed schedule.
When G. Campbell Morgan resigned the Westminster Chapel in London in 1917, Dr. Jowett once again crossed the ocean to take a new church. This would be his final pastorate. Declining health forced him to give up preaching in 1922, and his death in 1923 took from the world one of its most gifted and dedicated preachers.