Daily Devotionals

Devotional: March 12th

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE ONE OF STEADFAST PERSISTENCE

Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. - Revelation 2:10

I AM afraid that there are few things which the average Christian man of this generation more needs than the exhortation to steadfast continuance in the course which he says he has adopted. Most of us have our Christianity by fits and starts. It is spasmodic and interrupted. We grow, as the vegetable world grows, in the favorable months only, and there are long intervals in which there is no progress. Far too many of us have seasons of quickened consciousness and experience, and then dreary winters in which there is no life, and nothing but black frost binding the ground.

Take the lesson of this constantly recurring word "abide," and let there be in your Christianity the homely virtue of perseverance, for heaven is won and character is built up by homely virtues. "No day without a line," said the great author, as the secret of success. I look round upon our Christian communities, and I see many whose Christian experience is like some of the tropical rivers, bank full and foaming this month, and next, when the hot sunshine comes out, a stagnant pond here and another one there, and between them a ghastly stretch of white boulders. When the meteorologist puts his sensitized paper out to record the hours of brilliant sunshine in the day, there will come, in our climate and city, most often, a line where the sun has had its power, and then a long stretch of unchanged paper, where it had gone behind a cloud. That is a picture of the Christian experience of a disastrously large number of us. Let us learn this lesson, "Abide in My word; let My word abide in you." A Christian life should be one of steadfast, unbroken persistence.

Oh! but you say, "that is an ideal that nobody can get to." Well! I am not going to quarrel with anybody as to whether such an ideal is possible or not. It seems to me a woeful waste of time to be fighting about possible limits when we are so far short of the limits that are known. Until our lives approximate a great deal more closely to a continuous line, do not let us take each other by the throat because we may differ as to whether the line can ever be absolutely closed up into unbroken continuity.

How beautiful it is to see a man, below whose feet time is crumbling away, holding firmly by the Lord whom he has loved and served all his days, and finding that the pillar of cloud, which guided him while he lived, begins to glow in its heart of fire as the shadows fall, and is a pillar of light to guide him when he comes to die.

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