Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: August 25th

INTERRUPTED LIVES, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

When by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that some one teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God. - Hebrews 5:12

Consider the sad contrast of too many Christian lives. There are many so-called and, in a fashion, really Christian people, to whom Christ and His work are mainly, if not exclusively, the means of escaping the consequences of sin - a kind of "fire-escape." And to very many it comes as a new thought, in so far as their practical lives are concerned, that these ought to be lives of steadily increasing deliverance from the love and the power of sin, and steadily increasing appropriation and manifestation of Christ’s granted righteousness. There are, I think, many of us from whom the very notion of progress has faded away. I am sure there are some of us who were a great deal further on, on the path of the Christian life, years ago, when we first felt that Christ was anything to us, than we are to-day.

There is an old saying of one of the prophets that a child would die a hundred years old, which in a very sad sense is true about very many folk within the pale of the Christian Church who are seventy-year-old babes still, and will die so. Suns "growing brighter and brighter until the noonday! " Ah! there are many of us who are a great deal more like those strange, variable stars that sometimes burst out in the heaven? into a great blaze, that brings them up to the brightness of stars of the first magnitude, for a day or two, and then they dwindle until they become little specks of light that the telescope can hardly see.

And there are hosts of us who are instances, if not of arrested, at any rate of unsymmetrical, development. The head, perhaps, is cultivated; the intellectual apprehension of Christianity increases, while the emotional and the moral and the practical part of it are all neglected. Or, the converse may be the case; and we may be full of gush and of good emotion, and of fervor when we come to worship or to pray, and our lives may not be a hair the better for it all. Or, there may be a disproportion because of an exclusive attention to conduct and the practical side of Christianity, while the rational side of it, which should be the basis of all, and the emotional side of it, which should be the driving power of all, are comparatively neglected.

So, what with interruptions, what with growing by fits and starts, and long, dreary winters like the Arctic winters, coming in between the two or three days of rapid, and therefore brief and unwholesome, development, we must all, I think, take to heart the condemnation, when we compare the reality of our lives with the Divine intention concerning them. Let us ask ourselves, "Have I more command over myself than I had twenty years ago? Do I live nearer Jesus Christ to-day than I did yesterday? Have I more of His Spirit in me? Am I growing? Would the people that know me best say that I am growing in the grace and knowledge of my Lord and Saviour? " Astronomers tell us that there are dark suns, that have burnt themselves out, and are wandering unseen through the skies. I wonder if there are any extinguished suns among my readers.