Front matter
Inspirational Devotions _ for Every Day of the Year Author o Selected by Ann Spangler
DAILY HE LEADS ME
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Daily He Leads Me Hannah Whitall Smith Selected and Adapted by Ann Spangler Be VINE BOOKS Servant Publications Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright © 1985 by Ann Spangler All nights reserved Cover photo © H. Armstrong Roberts Book design by John B. Leidy Vine Books is an imprint of Servant Publications designed to serve Evangelical Christians.
Published by Servant Books P.O. Box 8617, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48107 The scripture quotations in this publication are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946,
1952 © 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-89283-228-2
85 86 87 88 1098765432
Preface HANNAH WHITALL SMITH was born in Philadelphia in 1832, just five years before Victoria began her sixty-four-year reign as monarch of England. She died in 1911, three years shy of World
War I. During her seventy-nine years, Hannah Smith witnessed the transformation of life wrought by the industrial revolution, the bloody strife of civil war in America, and the social revolution generated by the women's movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Never one to stand on the sidelines, she engaged in the debates of the day with relish. She and her husband Robert were active in evangelical movements in the United States and Britain and became well-known preachers on both sides of the Atlantic. At their home in England, dubbed Friday's Hill, they entertained such notable figures as George Bernard Shaw,
Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and Bernard Berenson.
Hannah's spiritual heritage, though rooted in her Quaker upbringing, was shaped primarily by her belief that the Bible held the words of eternity. Buffeted by life's tragedies, which included the death of four out of seven of her children, she consistently turned to scripture for answers to questions about life and its meaning. The results of her own steady faith and confidence in the word of God are graciously expressed in her best-selling book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. They are also contained in lesser-known books, such as The Open
vi / Daily He Leads Me Secret, Every Day Religion, The God of All Comfort, and Bible
Readings.
It is from these latter sources that I have compiled Daily He Leads Me. I have tried to draw from her writings reflections which most clearly convey her understanding of scriptural truths. Often I simply extracted the scripture passage and the reflections directly from her text. Occasionally, I have supplied the scripture passage at the head of the daily readings. Throughout the editing I have attempted to respect Hannah Smith's style and tone, to say things the way she would have and to change words only where the meaning was obscure or the language quaint.
Many of the themes—confidence in the love of God, abandonment to the will of God, knowledge of the character of God—come up again and again, as they must have in her own life. Ihave not been overly concerned about repetition, since the book is best used as a daily guide, in which each selection is allowed to instruct and inspire one day at a time. As in most things, we learn best when we learn life's lessons more than once.
My hope for readers is that their own spiritual life and understanding will be enriched, as mine has been, by the insights of this remarkable Christian, distinguished by her faith in an all-loving, all-powerful God, and confident in his care, no matter what the circumstances.
I owe special thanks to Vickie Wozny for her generosity in offering me her home for a full week of quiet and concentrated work on the book. Without her offer, the work of compiling and editing would have been much more laborious and less of the real pleasure that it turned out to be.
ANN SPANGLER
January See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. (1 Jn 3:1)
The love that God gives to us is the love a father has for his son, a tender protecting love, that knows our weakness and our need, and cares for us accordingly. He treats us as sons, and all he asks in return is that we treat him as a father, whom we can trust without anxiety. We must take the son's place of dependence and trust, and must let him do the father's part. Too often we take upon our own shoulders the father's part, and try to take care of and provide for ourselves. But no good earthly father would want his children to take upon their young shoulders the burden of his duties. Much less would our
Heavenly Father want to lay upon us the burden of his.
Do not fear or be dismayed: take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai; see, I have given into your hand the king, and his people, his city, and his land. (Jos 8:1)
Nothing is more abundantly proved in the Bible than this, that the Lord will fight for us, if we will only let him. He knows that we have no strength or might against our spiritual enemies;
2 / Daily He Leads Me and, like a tender mother, when her helpless children are attacked by an enemy, he fights for us. All he asks is that we be still and let him. This is the only sort of spiritual conflict that is ever successful.
But, you may ask, are we not to do any fighting ourselves? Of course we are to fight, but not in this fashion. We are to fight the "good fight of faith," as Paul exhorted Timothy; and the fight of faith is not a fight of effort or of struggle, but it is a fight of trusting. It is the kind of fight that Hezekiah fought when he and his army marched out to meet their enemy, singing songs of victory as they went, and finding their enemy all dead bodies.
Our part in this fight is to hand the battle over to the Lord and to trust him for the victory.
Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. (Eph 6:14-16)
We are to put on God's armor, not our own. The apostle tells us what it is. It is the girdle of truth, and the breastplate of righteousness, and the preparation of the gospel of peace on our feet, and the shield of faith to quench the flaming darts of the evil one.
There is nothing here about promises or resolutions; nothing about hours and days of agonizing struggles, and of bitter remorse. "Besides all these, taking the shield of faith." Faith is the one essential thing, without which all else is useless. We must not only hand the battle over to the Lord, but we must leave it with him, and must have absolute faith that he will conquer. It is here where the fight comes in. It seems so unsafe to sit still and do nothing but trust the Lord. The temptation to take the battle back into our own hands is often tremendous. To keep hands off in spiritual matters is as hard for us as it is for the drowning man to keep hands off the one who is trying to rescue