THE FAMILY ALTAR
June 30.
"For I say unto you that none of those men which were bidden
shall taste of my supper." Luke 14:24.
The first-bidden guests to the supper refused the king's gra-
cious invitation and offered excuses. But their empty excuses
only served to anger him and to exclude them from the feast.
Rightly so. Supper time is no time to go and look at real estate
or to examine cattle. The men making such excuses had all day
to look at the ground or the oxen they had bought. As for the
man who had taken a wife, it was his plain duty to bring her
along to the supper. There was yet room, and the gracious king
would have been glad to welcome her at his banquet. Oh, these
empty excuses, these miserable evasions, by which people try to
justify their staying away from the saving Gospel-feast! They
say they cannot go to church because they have no clothes to wear,
or the weather doesn't suit them, or they don't like the preacher
or the people in the church, or they have a pressing social or
business engagement, and the like. The true reason is, that their
carnal hearts do not care for Christ and His saving means of grace.
They are only treasuring up unto themselves wrath against the
day of wrath by their hypocritical excuses, and will learn to their
everlasting sorrow that while they could excuse themselves into
hell they can never excuse themselves out of it. "He that loveth
father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me ; and he that
loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me," says
our Savior. (Matt. 10, 37.) Even they have no excuse who have
married a husband or wife of no faith or of a different faith. Let
them earnestly and persistently, but lovingly strive to bring them
to Christ's saving Church, and if they refuse, still come themselves.
— Is our place at the supper of grace still empty ? God grant
that we all have come to Jesus and daily take of His fulness grace
for grace. Let us pray for all our straying, erring fellow-men :