that you are a liar. You do
not wish anything of the kind. I heard of a man once who was always
threatening to commit suicide. He had a good friend who was a pious
man and who was grieved by such threats. But he heard them till he
knew they meant nothing, so one day he stepped into this man's room at
the hotel, laid an ugly looking revolver down on the dresser and said,
"John, old man, you have been threatening to take your own life for
some time. I do not want you to do it. It is murder and you will have
no chance to repent. I love you as I love myself. For this reason I
have decided to kill you. I will live long enough to repent. So get
over there at the table and make your will." And the man's face went
white and he wanted to wait till to-morrow.

How did God cure this man who was in the blues? First, He used a very
commonplace remedy. He put him to sleep. He let him rest. Rest is a
very religious thing for a tired man. Now, a man who has overworked
himself needs to rest from his work. A lot of blue people need rest
from idleness. One big reason they are blue is because they have
nothing else to do. God gave this man a rest. That was the first step.

In the second place, He showed him his sin. He showed him where he was
wrong and brought him to repentance and thus restored the old
relationship of the past. He asked him this question: "What doest thou
here, Elijah?" The emphasis is on the "doest." Elijah must have
blushed at that question. And he said, "Oh, I am whining. I am
complaining. I am trying to keep books, to add up a few columns of
figures and test by that as to whether I am a success or a failure."

Now, what the Lord wanted Elijah to learn is just what He wants you and
me to learn, that our job in this world is not bookkeeping. It is not
for us to try to sum up the amount of good we have done. It is not for
us to test whether we have succeeded or whether we have failed. The
truth of the matter is that we are not always competent to tell the
difference between success and failure. There are some seeming
successes that in reality are failures and there are some of the
supreme failures that have turned out to be the most glorious successes.

The greatest failure in the eyes of men that was ever made, was the
failure on Calvary, and yet it came to pass that the world's darkest
night was in reality the mother of its brightest day; that its grimmest
desert became its sweetest fl