Copyright © 2007¹

chapter 10 from the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

A Mother’s Day Tribute²

Mother had a catechism which was called The Child’s Catechism. She used it for teaching us before we could read. She asked questions, and answered them either according to the book or with her own “Notes” and personal explanations and illustrations. The first question in the book was “Who created you?” The answer was in a monosyllable, “God.”

I have never been able to get away from that teaching. It was in harmony with the Lord’s Prayer she taught me a little later, beginning with the same Person, only the name was changed to “Our Father.” From that day I always believed that God was my Father in the creation sense, and that He was the Creator of all souls, and ruler of this world. I could never believe that I was a “child of the devil.” In sin I acted like a child of the devil, and was on his side, but all this while I was a prodigal from home. While in sin, and I read from the Bible, “All souls [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

If you want a happy New Year,
be up to date!²

The word for the closing and opening years should be “Up to Date.” We need not sit down in tears over the past which is gone. We had better be on our feet for a move forward. We must some way bring our past up to date, settled, canceled, cleared up to the present, or we will not have a fair start for the New Year. The sooner we actually get our whole past under the blood, certainly, and surely, and have witness to the same, the sooner we will be ready for our tomorrow. We need to be paid up to date and prayed up, and forgiven up, and cleansed up to date, and consecrated up to the [continue reading…]

Copyright 2007, 2019 by Jim Kerwin¹

A chapter from the book
Sunnyside Papers: Inspirational Sketches
from God’s “Book of Nature”
by
Isaiah Reid

Bountiful, yes — and thankful!²

It is November.³ We have had an old-time Iowa fall. The charming weather has been just like a northern Florida winter, save the softness and balminess of the air. But doubtless for Iowa, the atmosphere we have had is better for us than that in Florida would have been. What is all right for one part of the country is not always the best thing for the other. Certainly, our fall has charmed everyone; and could it last, no one would care to go to California or to [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

Living by Dying

To have life through death seems like a strange paradox. Thinking of making spiritual advance by what reasonably appears to be extinguishment of the very life we want enlarged is a way we would never choose of ourselves. And yet there is a real sense in which “to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21), in the line of spiritual progress. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 1 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

Perhaps you should re-think
that ship ride you just arranged…²

The Lord evidently permitted these uncertain, backsliding Israelites to do certain things He did not endorse. When we will go our way and will not go His way, the Lord often makes our wrath, or disobedience, to praise Him,³ by making our own way result in such defeat and disaster that it brings us to see where we are. Leanness or defeat of soul is the medicine that we find brings us to see where we are and what we are. [continue reading…]

Public Domain (with exceptions)¹

This passage points out some important items for the daily needs of life’s journey. All travelers in the King’s Country are furnished with a most excellent tourist’s guide. Attention to the truths in the above-mentioned verses would save from much needless mistake, regret, blunder, and falling, it may be. God would have us all real students. He expects us to read and think for ourselves. He arranges place and time for us to sit in His library and feast on its treasures, and learn for ourselves the wonders of His kingdom that now is, and that which is to come. He wants us to look into His textbooks, to walk with Him amid the beauties and glories of the natural world. The seas are His [Psalm 95:5], the stars in heaven are His. The secrets of air and ether² are His. The generative forces of nature are all His. We are His children. He made this world for us. The world of mind and spirit are His. They are a step nearer Himself than the material universe. It is more to find, see, and understand God in the hidden spheres of spiritual life, than in the world of material things. [continue reading…]

by
Rev. Isaiah Reid

Copyright © 2007¹

“This flower trumpet also tells of transformed life.”²

Daffodil days are here again. There are season days that come but once a year. Especially are these marked in springtime and autumn. Such days are peculiarly illustrated. The finest designs and engravings are put in Nature’s Almanac during these weeks. They may vary some at times, but are as regular in their marking of the seasons as the stars. We can mark months and years by God’s floral designs. The Daffodils and Easter are almost synchronous. This year they came two days before Easter. Though not first in the list of blooms, yet they lift their trumpets as if to proclaim the special gladness of the hour. They seem born to announce something special. Other flowers have their story, but what came these to announce? Nothing but the best things, for they are so pure and so royally adorned in the richest of gold, surrounded by their white perianth lifted high above their linear leaves of green. Out of the black mold,³ into rich green, then a corolla of white out of which is lifted the golden trumpet. And, as if this were not enough, fragrance is added, as if this trumpet was both an instrument of announcement and a censer waving in a temple service, dispensing incense with every passing whisper of the winds. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

Life Through Death

As we gain life by being brought by divine power “from death unto life,”² so we retain and enlarge life by continuing the process of passing from death unto life. We must not fall to thinking that we can die of ourselves, or do the execution ourselves, for we cannot. “To kill and make alive” belongs to God.³ But it is ours to recognize the fact that life is by the way of death, and to submit to God. Nor must we fall to inventing methods of capital punishment and torture for ourselves, like the old Ascetics, or invent crosses, and flagellations and penances. The true “death route” is God’s appointment, and not the plan we may fix up for ourselves. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 2 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

“Be strong and very courageous” to walk
through the door when God opens it.²

The other day I saw one of my schoolboy comrades. Nearly a generation has passed since we last met. He did not know me, nor would I have known him had I not gone to see him, and was told before we met that it was he. Among other things, he said, and it seemed to press him heavily: “Do you remember a talk we had in the harvest field one time just before you went away to begin your studies,³ and you tried to persuade me to go also, and I thought I did not need to? And here I am now, and have only been a poor clodhopper ever since. It was the mistake of my life.” [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 18 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

“I think it is God’s plan
that our desires shall find realization,
but they must be in His order.”²

There were many others with Moses and Aaron whom the Lord did not permit to go over and see the goodly Canaan. With Moses especially, and perhaps with many others, the reason was not because Moses was not fully saved. There was no unsettled account. He made one break, but that had been settled at once. If ever a saint had a death in which the tokens of salvation were manifest, it was the case of this grand man among men, perhaps the grandest and most noble of Old Testament characters, if not of all Bible characters. So God’s reason for not granting his desire must not be laid in the fact that there was something lacking with his salvation, or that there was something wrong with his relationship to God. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

Photo of Isaiah Reid (1836-1911)
at about the time he wrote
this historical perspective

It was the early spring of 1879. There was no Holiness Association in Iowa. At least three National camp-meetings had been held in the state.³ These awakened great interest, and the work was followed up by a pastor here and there who was in the experience. Outside of the Methodist Church there was throughout the whole state a great ignorance of the doctrine, and much speaking against such an experience. And yet beginning specially with these great National camp-meetings, there were hundreds of hungry hearts wanting to find such a blessing, but not knowing how. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

Advance by Self-Denial

When Jesus spoke of “losing life” and “hating life” and “saving life” and “finding life,” He must have used the word life in two senses. The contrast evidently is between life in this world and life after this world. When He speaks of “loving” and “hating” in the above text it is evident He does not mean in the absolute sense of either of these words, for we are commanded not only to live, but to provide for living this life, and there is a sense in which we are not to hate it. The prohibition refers to over-loving it. [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 3 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

Even measles can be a blessing that God can use
to alter the course of a life.²

I suppose it is one of the hardest lessons we have to learn, that adjustment to God in spirit and in providence is the true way to happiness. Usually we are so full of our own way and purpose that some of us have, like Jonah, to make attempted trips to Tarshish, in the way of carrying out our plans, to find God’s plan. At any rate, it is a great revolution to exchange our plan for His. In doing so, He may, and often does, “make us willing in the day of His power,”³ even though He “leads us by a way we know not.”⁴ And why need God lead us by a way that we see?  We usually cry, “I can’t understand all this! I don’t know what God means by it; if I could only see why He does it, then I could be satisfied.” Our choosing our way is one thing; His directing of our steps is quite another thing. He disposes our plans and, though allowing us to choose our way by directions He has given, directs our feet into a way we never would have planned for ourselves. [continue reading…]