an emergency coming into a man's life makes radical changes. You
go to bed tonight and ordinarily will sleep out your eight hours in
comfort and quiet. If a fire break out in the house, you are up in the
middle of the night, hurrying around, only partly clad, carrying out
valuables, or helping turn on water, or something of this sort. Your
natural arrangements for the night are all broken up by the fire. An
emergency may make radical changes in one's life for a little time,
sometimes for the whole life. Financial reverses may change the whole
habit of one's life.

Here's a man who has a well-assured, good-sized income from his business,
or his inheritance, or both. He lives in a luxuriously appointed home,
with many fine pictures and works of art and curios which it is enjoyable
to have. He has a choice library including some fine costly old prints and
editions, and enjoys adding rare books on subjects in which he is
specially interested. He belongs to some literary and social and athletic
clubs. He has an interesting family growing up around him whose education
is being carefully looked after. He is an earnest Bible-loving Christian,
faithful in church attendance and church duties, pure in life, and saintly
in character. He gives liberally to church and benevolent objects,
including foreign missions, which have become a part of the church system
into which he fits. And he goes an even, contented round of life, home,
church, club, recreation and so on, year in and out, holding and using the
great bulk of his money for himself. I think of that as one illustration
of the good, true, natural life.

Now, the Father-pleasing life is radically different in certain things.
Ordinarily the two would be identical. The true natural life as originally
planned for us would be the life pleasing to the Father. But something,
not a part of God's plan, has broken into life, a terrible something,
worse than a fire in the night, or a financial panic that sweeps away your
all. Sin has wrought fearful havoc; it has made an awful emergency, and
this emergency has affected the life and character of all the race, in a
bad way, terribly, awfully, beyond words to tell, or imagination to
depict. The whole earth is in the grip of a desperate moral emergency.

And naturally enough this emergency affects the life of any one concerned
with this earth. It has affected God's life, and God's plans,
tremendously. It has broken His heart with grief, and