Chapter 10
Guided by His Eye
Just a word to the sons and daughters of Adam — I suppose just about everybody now believes that Adam and Eve were our grandfather and grandmother. Well, of course, the crowd that believes that we came from the tadpole probably would resent that statement, so as I am very broad and liberal I will allow the plug hat brigade to keep their own record.
But here is what I want to talk to you about. I have just read in the thirty-second psalm and eighth verse the wonderful words of the Lord. Notice them: “I will guide thee with mine eye.” Well, thank the Lord! How beautiful it is in the Lord to be willing to guide us with His eye! In the days in which we live the very land is flooded with new “isms” and “schisms,” new doctrines and heresies, and wildfire, fanaticism, religious crooks and bums, religious down-and-outs-thousands of them morally too crooked to sleep in the roundhouse. They are too crooked to build a rail fence. They are not even straight enough to look at the rainbow. Many of them are as slick as eels and as squirmy as water moccasins. But they have just had a new revelation from the Lord, and they have just struck a new religious craze, and now they are out in full blast to deliver the goods.
But we are not surprised at the new heresies when we see the dead formality in the church, for dead formalism breeds heresy. In these awful days to realize that God will guide us through this troublesome world with His eye is a consolation to us that ought to make us shout for the next thousand years. And with this wonderful text before us, it is too late now in the history of the world for a man to say he doesn’t know where to go and what to believe. For we have it in the above declaration that God put himself on record and has declared emphatically that He will guide us with His eye. I believe from the depth of my soul that I have been able to get to the right place at the right time and in the right way for the past forty years now, for just forty years ago I met Jesus on the frontiers of Texas, and He kicked the devil out of my heart, and pitched him over the back yard fence. He set up His kingdom in my soul, and gave me such a chunk of sunshine and glory that I have been climbing around over it and finding new things and beautiful things in my chunk of sunshine for the last forty years. When I think of the fact that God is still guiding me with His eye, I have nothing to fear, nothing to lose, nothing to be uneasy about, just walk as Jesus walked and rest and abide in Him. His will is my will, and the way that He has provided is so much better than I could have provided for myself that it almost tickles me to death to think that I have so much in my favor.
The reader will remember that upon one occasion Jesus said to the brokenhearted disciples as He was leaving them, “When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” But away back before that the Psalmist had said that “I will guide thee with mine eye.” When a man is guided with the eye of the Lord, he will get to the place that God intended him to go to just exactly on time, and he will fit into the place when he gets there, just like the stripes fit in the rainbow. God looked in the direction that He wanted me to go, then He looked at me, and I hit the trail a-running. Thank the Lord, for these forty years, by being led by His Spirit, upheld by His hand, protected by a wall of fire, and guided by His eye, I have been able to keep off the breakers. Many have been the plans that the devil has laid to defeat and wreck me, but just as often as the devil laid a plan to defeat me, God laid a plan to protect me. When the devil stepped up and laid down a temptation before me, Jesus walked up and laid down a way of escape by the side of it, and the Holy Spirit whispered in my soul, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” And by listening to His voice and obeying His commands, thank God, I stand before Him today with His wings over my head, and with His everlasting arms beneath me, and with His love in my soul. It is beautiful, it is glorious, it is beyond description. It looks like it is too good to be true, but thank God it is so.