Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: January 10th

WHO IS YOUR KING?

Choose you this day whom you will serve. - Joshua 24:15

You should deliberately decide whether or not Jesus Christ is to be your Saviour and your King. Deliberately decide! God has given us that awful gift of choice, and thereby has laid upon us a tremendous weight of responsibility which separates us from all the less endowed, and sometimes, because less endowed, more happy creatures round us. And what do men do with it for the most part? I wonder how many of us have drifted into our "opinions," as we are pleased to call them, by quite another process than that of an intelligent weighing of the force of evidence. I wonder how many of us have, what we say, with unconscious self-condemnation, fallen into ways and habits of action which we never consciously resolved should be our masters. I believe, for my part, that the most of the life of the bulk of men is lived without any adequate exercise of their own deliberate volition and determination. Sadly, too, many of us seem to think that Nansen’s way of getting to the North Pole is the best way of getting through the world - to put ourselves into a current and let it carry us. We drift. We do not decide, or, if we do, we let deliberate choice be coerced by inclination, and let wishes put their claws into the scale, and drag it down. Or we allow our environment to settle a large part of our beliefs and of our practices. It must settle a great deal of both for all of us; and none of us can get rid of the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. But we are meant to be hammers, and not anvils; to mould circumstances, not to be battered and molded by them; to exercise a deliberate choice, and not to be like dead fish in the river, who are carried by the stream - or like derelicts in the Atlantic, that go floating about for years, and never reach any port at all, but are caught by the currents, and are slaves of every wind that blows.

Youth is the time for hope. The world lies all before us, fair and untried. The past is too brief to occupy us long, and its farthest point too near to be clothed in the airy purple which draws the eye and stirs the heart. We are conscious of increasing powers which crave for occupation. It seems impossible but that success and joy shall be ours. So we live for a little while in a golden haze; we look down from our peak upon the virgin forests of a new world that roll away to the shining waters in the west; and then we plunge into their mazes to hew out a path for ourselves, to slay the wild beasts, and to find and conquer rich lands. But soon we discover what hard work the march is, and what monsters lurk in the leafy coverts, and diseases hover among the marshes, and how short a distance ahead we can see, and how far off it is to the treasure-cities we dreamed of; and if at last we gain some cleared spot whence we can look forward, our weary eyes are searching at most for a place of rest, and all our hopes have dwindled to hopes of safety and repose. If you have God for your " enduring substance," you can face all varieties of condition, and be calm, saying,

"Give what Thou canst, without Thee I am poor,

And with Thee rich; take what Thou wilt away."

The amulet that charms away disquiet lies here.