Daily Devotionals

Devotional: May 23rd

FAMILIARIZATION OF HABIT

Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not? - Lamentations 3:37.

Let me remind you how a strong wish for a thing that seems desirable always lends to confuse to a man the plain distinction between right and wrong; and how passions once excited, or the animal lusts and desires once kindled in a man, go straight to their object without the smallest regard to whether that object is to be reached by the breach of all laws, human and Divine, or not. If a man is hungry, and bread is before him, his mouth waters, whether it is his own or other people’s. Excite any passion, and the passion is but a blind propensity towards certain good, and has no question or consideration of whether right or wrong is involved at all. Habit familiarizes with evil, and diminishes our sense of it as evil. A man that has been for a half-a day in some ill-ventilated room does not notice the poisonous atmosphere; if you go into it, you are half-suffocated at first, and breathe more easily as you get used to it. A man can live amidst the foulest poison of evil; and, as the Styrian peasants get fat upon arsenic, his whole nature may seem to thrive by the poison that it absorbs. They tell us that the breed of fish that live in the lightless caverns in the bowels of some mountains, by long disuse have had their eyes atrophied out of them, and are blind because they have lived out of the light. And so men that live in the love of evil lose the capacity of discerning the evil. And he that walketh in darkness becomes blind, blind to his sin, and blind to all the realities of life.

Then is it not true, too, that many of us systematically and of set purpose continually avoid all questions as to the moral nature of our conduct? How many a man and woman never sits down to think whether what they have been doing is right or wrong, because they have got, deep down, an uneasy suspicion as to what the answer would be. So. by reason of fostering passion, by reason of listening to wishes, by reason of the habit of wrong doing, by reason of the systematic avoidance of all careful investigation of our character and of our conduct, we lose the power of fairly deciding upon the nature of our own acts.

In order to secure habitual godliness, you will want manly strength and vigor, because you can get no hold of an unseen God except by a definite effort of thought, which will require resolute will. There we touch on one of the reasons why much modern Christianity is so feeble. We do not screw ourselves up to think about God and Christ in our daily life. So the truths which we believe slip from our slack grasp before we know that they are gone. A conjuror will put a coin in a man’s palm, and shut his hand upon it, and say, "Are you sure you have got it?" "Open your hands." It is not there. That is how a good many of you lose your religion; you think you have it; you once had it. The last time you looked at it, it was there. It is not there now. Why? Because you have not added to your faith strength, and made the efforts of mind and will which are needed in order to keep hold of the things which have been freely given to you of God. Do not spend your time upon merely trying to cultivate special graces of the Christian character, however needful they may be for you, and however beautiful they may be in themselves. Seek to have that which sanctifies and strengthens them all. Faith is the foundation, godliness the apex and crown.

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