Life & Letters: Seek the Lord While Your Heart is Young and Tender

Friday, November 26, 2010

Seek the Lord While Your Heart is Young and Tender

A selection from a letter by Ernie Reisinger to a grandson at Christmas. Mr. Reisinger was a faithful witness for Christ till the day he went home to glory. He longed to see sinners bowing the knee to Jesus Christ and confessing him as Lord and Savior. He especially desired to see his family members converted. So along with a gift certificate for Christmas, he urged one of his grandsons to be saved. The letter was written in December, 1979.

… We are enclosing a gift certificate for Christmas, and as we do, our thoughts turn to the real meaning of Christmas, that is, why Jesus came – 'To save his people from their sins,' and 'To seek and to save that which is lost.'

Our prayers for you this Christmas are that you would be seeking him as he is seeking you. We would encourage you and plead with you to seek the Lord while your heart is young and tender because if you delay, your heart will grow harder, and then, humanly speaking, it will be more difficult to be saved. God can and does save sinners at any age, but more often he seems to choose the time of youth. You will therefore understand our prayer for you at this season so that your young day will not pass over your head without you being saved, or that you will remember your misspent privileges if you are not saved at all…

Ernest C. Reisinger: A Biography, by Geoffrey Thomas, The Banner of Truth Trust, 2002, pp. 170-71.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Friday, November 26, 2010

Seek the Lord While Your Heart is Young and Tender

No comments:

About Me

Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

Life & Letters Blogroll

Blog Archive

Some Good Web Sites