2 John 1

Written In Ink

Paper and ink. 2 John 1:12.

Do you remember the very first time you tried to write in ink? You had never been allowed to use anything but pencil, but one day Mother said you might use a pen and ink. Wasn't it glorious and messy? And didn't you feel grown-up all in a minute because you were old enough to write in ink?

Well, here is a story about writing in ink, and though the rest of the sermon is for older boys and girls, even the tiny ones may understand the story.

There were once two little girls named Nancy and Peggy. Nancy was four and Peggy was three. Nancy was a very smart little woman for her age. She knew already all the letters of the alphabet the great printed capitals, the little printed letters, and even the written letters like those in copybooks. She knew them all by sight, but she could write only a few of them. She was sadly puzzled, for instance, by the written letter “e.” She had diligently licked her pencil and covered sheet after sheet of paper with attempts at “e” but without success. Where she always failed was this. She started all right, but when she came to the loop of the letter instead of going up the right side of the loop, coming back down the left, and then crossing the first line, she went up the left side of the loop then tried to come down the right and make it join neatly at the crossing.

Now, boys and girls, God gives us our life like a clean white sheet of paper, but the writing on it is ours. When you were little you wrote with a pencil or washable marker. You do what Mother or Nurse or Auntie tells you to do or not to do. If you are naughty or disobedient you get a spanking, or are put in the corner, or are sent to bed early; and somehow the punishment seems to rub out the naughty deed you had written on life's paper.

But a day comes when you no longer write life's doings in pencil. You write them in ink. You no longer do what someone else suggests. You think and act for yourselves. You wake one day to the fact that you are your own master, you can make your own life. You have learned how to write “e's.” You are using ink, and the old days of pencil are left behind. There is no more rubbing out now of what you write; once written, it remains for ever.

Now, how are you going to write on life's paper? Are you going to write your story so that at the end you can feel proud of it? Or are you going to make it a blurred mess? the ink there, sure enough, but all in the wrong place; blots and smudges everywhere; the writing slanting now to the right, now to the left, now jumping above the line, now dipping below it; what might have been a fair page, ruined; and no hope of making it better! For no eraser, however wonderful, can rub out the mistakes once we have written them.

No, we can never rewrite what once is written. But we can do this we can try to write the lines in front of us better and more carefully. We have always the chance to make the present and the future nobler than the past.

Yes, and we have this too for encouragement. God is also writing on our page of life. Side by side with ours His writing runs. We do not see it now, but one day, when everyone's writing is being judged by Him, and we are feeling particularly ashamed of our blotted records, He will tell us to look at them again. And when we look we shall find that the writing we did has vanished, and instead of it there is on the paper God's record of our life. Where we saw only a blot and a failure, God has written that we succeeded though we never knew it. Where we saw a desperately uneven line, He has said that the unevenness was there because we were trying so hard to keep to the line and do the right. As for some of the bits of which we were proudest! God's record may tell us that there we did no great thing, for we wrote it so, not for His sake, but that it might look well in the sight of our fellow-men.

Use your ink wisely, boys and girls; write each letter of life's story as in God's sight, and to please Him. Then you need not fear when at the last you lay your written sheets before Him.