Daily Devotionals

Devotional: October 13th

WHOLE-HEARTED RELIGION

They ... sought Him with their whole desire; and He was found of them: and the Lord gave them rest round about. - 2 Chronicles 25:15

One reason why the great mass of professing Christians make so little of their religion is because they are only half-hearted in it. If you divide a river into two streams the force of each is less than half the power of the original current; and the chances are that you will make a stagnant marsh where there used to be a flowing stream. " All in all, or not at all," is the rule for life in all departments. It is a rule in daily business. A man that has only half himself in his profession or trade, while the other half is dreaming, is predestined to fail. The same is true about our religion. If you and I attend to it as a kind of by-occupation; if we give the balance of our time and the superfluity of our energy, after we have done a hard day’s work - say, an hour upon a Sunday - to seeking God, and devote all the rest of the week to seeking worldly prosperity, it is no wonder if our religion languishes, and is mainly a matter of forms, as it is with such hosts of people that call themselves Christians. There is more unconscious unreality in the average Christian man’s endeavor to be a better Christian than there is in almost anything else in the world:

"One foot on the sea, and one on land,

To one thing constant never."

That is why so many of us know nothing of a progressive strengthening of our faith, and an increasing conquest of ourselves, and a firmer grasp of God, and a fuller realization of the blessedness of walking in His ways. This wholeheartedness does not mean that there are to be no other desires, for it is a great mistake to pit religion against other things which are meant to be its instruments and its helps. We are not required to seek nothing else in order to seek God wholly. He demands no impossible and fantastic detachment of ourselves from the ordinary and legitimate occupations, affections, and duties of human life; but He does ask that the dominant desire after Him should be powerful enough to express itself through all our actions, and that we should seek for God in them and for them in God. There must be detachment if there is to be attachment. If some climbing plant, for instance, has twisted itself round the unprofitable thorns in the hedge, the gardener, before he can get it to go up the support that it is meant to encircle, has carefully to detach it from the stays to which it has wantonly clung, taking care that in the process he does not break its tendrils and destroy its power of growth. So, to train our souls to cleave to God, and to grow on round the great stay that is provided for us, there is needed, as an essential part of the process, the voluntary, conscious, conscientious, and constant guarding of ourselves from the vagrancies of our desires, which send out their shoots away from Him.

It is when God comes into the Temple that Dagon falls on the threshold. It is when a new affection begins to spring in the heart that old loves are thrust out of it. To seek Him with the whole heart is to engage the whole self in the quest, and that is the only kind of seeking which has the certainty of success.

Copyright Statement