Be a Living Letter
In the Hour of Silence
Today's Devotional
Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God —1 Peter 2:10 (NIV).
In old libraries there are palimpsests. The parchment once, long ago, carried another writing from that which you read on it now. But the ancient writing has been obliterated, and something new and different has been put in its place. Perhaps a heathen poem, with foolish and evil stories of the false gods of Olympus, was there before. But the pagan poem is gone, with its ensnaring witchery and glamor, and in its room there is one of the Gospels in Greek or Latin—the blessed history of Jesus and His love. Or it is a sermon of Ambrose; or a letter of Jerome from his cave in Bethlehem; or a chapter in the Confessions of Augustine, who was tossed about by every wind and yet was steered secretly by God’s hand into the desired haven.
Every redeemed and renewed heart is just such a palimpsest.
Formerly the heart had written on it all wickedness, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings. But the old legend has been deleted by the grace of God; and now the heart bears this inscription, A newborn babe, a living stone, a spiritual house. It is a soul for God’s own possession. It shows forth the excellences of Him who called it out of darkness into His marvellous light. It is an epistle of Christ, written by His Spirit, and sealed with His autograph.
I wonder whether my heart is among the palimpsests of the kingdom of God. Once disregard of Him was graven there, but now a passion of delight in Him. Once the world filled it from title to colophon, but now it “lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
About the author and the source
It is for his book Men of the Covenant (the story of the martyred Scottish Covenanters) that Alexander Smellie (1857–1923) is remembered today. Nonetheless, his devotional Hour of Silence was so popular in its own day it had to be reprinted eight times in twenty-four years. He was a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland and an editor and contributor to Christian magazines.
Alexander Smellie. In the Hour of Silence: A Book of Daily Meditations for a Year. London: Andrew Melrose, 1899.