Intercessor – Chapter 8 THE TRAMPS

Every young servant of God has to learn to keep under the body, and in the early days of his training, he goes through necessary disciplines. “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off…” God began to deal with a simple appetite in Rees Howells – the love of food. It was at a time when he had a great burden for a certain convention, which was being disrupted by assaults of the enemy. The Lord called him to a day of prayer and fasting, which was something new to him. Used, as he was, to a comfortable home and four good meals a day, it came as a shock to realize that it meant no dinner, and he was agitating about it. And would it only happen once? Supposing God asked him to do it every day! When midday came he was on his knees in his bedroom, but there was no prayer that next hour. “I didn’t know such a lust was in me,” he said afterwards. “My’ agitation was the proof of the grip it had on me. If the thing had no power over me, why did I argue about, it?” At one o’clock his mother called him, and he told her he wasn’t taking lunch. But she called again, as “a mother would, and urged, “It won’t take you long to have it.” The goodly aroma from downstairs was too much for him, and down he came. But after the meal, when he returned to his room, he couldn’t get back into the presence of God. He came face to face with disobedience to the Holy Ghost. “I felt I was like the mart in the garden of Eden,” he said. “I went up the mountain and walked miles, cursing that ‘old man’ within me. I felt that if God were to fake lunch from me to the end of my days, He would be justified in doing it. To some people there might seem nothing in it, but once you are God s channel, on no account can you disobey Him, or bring in your own ideas. I wept many tears, and it almost seemed as if He would never allow me to come back into His presence, till He said, ‘I will forgive you, but you are not to go unpunished. You hold up your hands while you pray from 6 to 9 o’clock.’” (Ex. 17:11, 12; 1 Tim. 2:8″) The closer a person is to God, the more terrible is the least sin seen to be. He didn’t take dinner for many days after that, but spent the hour with God. As he said later, “The moment I got victory in it, it wasn’t a very big thing to do; it was merely a stepping-stone to His next call to me. It is while you still want a thing that you can’t get your mind off it. When you have risen above it, He may give it back to you; but then you are out of it.” Hot long after this, and only a few months after he had Started the ministry in the” village, the Lord gave him a further commission, for which these lessons were an obvious preparation. He laid on him the burden of the tramps, the many men who were to be found in that district, wandering homeless and jobless from place to place. They were to give a chance to every tramp that came to” the mission. It was to be a practical lesson of what divine love is towards an undeserving sinner. The Spirit made plain what they were to do: to give each man a new suit of clothes, find him lodgings and work, and pay his board until he drew his first pay. “We were called to put Isaiah 58 into practice,” said Mr. Howells. “‘Deal thy bread to the hungry.., bring the poor that are cast out to thy house; and when thou seest the naked, cover him.’ In our first love; we had blamed everyone who did not believe that the Bible was literally true, and the Spirit now compelled us to put our own belief into practice! The Sermon on the Mount stated the laws of the Kingdom, and we were to act on them to the hilt: ‘If any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also… Give to him that asketh thee., to Love your enemies…’ “I soon found out also that the aim of the Spirit in this was to bring me to that grade ,in life where I would love the unlovely ones. My self-nature and natural love. had, to be changed for the divine nature and love, before I could love a tramp as my own brother. Helping the people of the village was easy compared with helping the tramps, for they were people who usually would not help themselves, and often did not appreciate the help of others. But I was to act towards each exactly as I would if he were my own brother.” The very day of this new commission they saw a tramp in their meeting for the first time. He had been on the road for months, without work or lodgings, and had heard the singing in the mission. He was overcome with the reception he was given. One of the believers provided him with lodgings and found him work. In two days another came. “News of charity is like wireless,” Mr. Howells said, “carried far and wide in no time, and a greater number came than we had bargained for. We were not allowed to stop them; if they came of their own accord, we did not dare to turn them away. I didn’t call them tramps, I preferred the name the Saviour used, and called them prodigals; and I learned, according to 1 John 4:20, that you don’t love the Saviour one bit more than you love the least one He died for.” […]

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