Welcome to New Loft Chamber...

To all who stumble upon this little blog, I hope you will find something here to encourage you in your travels along the way...something to comfort you, something to help you, something to uplift you.

Jay Bruce


“Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not way from, but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there will we be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows, it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives—binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. Only when we humbly walk this path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall fined the promise true, that he who loses his life shall find it. Only when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and example, we take no account of ourselves, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself also: 'Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him.' The path of self-sacrifice is the path to glory.”

-- Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, from his sermon Imitating the Incarnation


Thursday, November 20, 2008

On the death of a child


A letter from the pen of Thomas Charles, Minister in Bala, North Wales, Jan. 23, 1788
I write this to you from the house of mourning. My little girl died yesterday, after a twelve months existence in this our world, in almost continual affliction and sorrow. At last death prevailed and separated her from her afflicted body, to meet again, when both the one and the other will be fuller of holiness and felicity than they were here of sin and sorrow. How free was the grace which saved her and took her to glory! It came to her unthought of, unsought for, and undesired. Her sin was taken away without any sorrow for it, hatred towards it, or striving against it. Without any contest she got the victory forever over all the enemies of our souls! Without travelling one step of the wilderness-road, she got safe to Canaan. The grace implanted within her is got to its full growth without the nurture and discipline which others require and are exercised with. Here it was but as seed under-grown; but now it is full-grown and loaded with the richest fruits. Blessed be God for his full salvation! I think myself happy to be the parent of this little vessel of mercy to be filled with eternal glory. "The Lord gave; the Lord hath taken away" -- nothing but his own; "blessed by the name of the Lord!" -- My health has been but indifferent at intervals all this winter; but at present through mercy I am tolerably well. This poor house of clay will be soon in ruins. Blessed be God for a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens! Do not forget me and mine at the throne of mercy. -- T. C.
May the thoughts of this eminent saint comfort you if you have buried a child and know the "house of mourning" spoken of by Charles.
[NB, A Welsh girl named Mary Jones once walked many miles to buy a Bible from Thomas Charles. The great need for Bibles led Charles to help found The British and Foreign Bible Society (now just The Bible Society). Since then The Bible Society has distributed millions of Bibles.]
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