Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 10th

"GOD BURIES HIS WORKMEN, AND CARRIES ON HIS WORK"

But I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought and vanity: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God. - Isaiah 49:4

The twofold process always at work - the silent dropping away and silent growth - suggests lessons which should be enforced. Let us be quite sure that we give them their due weight in our thoughts and lives, that we never give an undue weight to the one half of the whole truth. There are plenty of people who are far too much, constitutionally and (perhaps by reason of a mistaken notion of religion) religiously, inclined to the contemplation of the more melancholy side of these truths; and there are a great many people who are far too exclusively disposed to the contemplation of the other. But the bulk of us never trouble our heads about either the one or the other, but go on, forgetting altogether that swift, sudden, stealthy, skinny hand that is put out to lay hold of the swimmer and then pull him underneath the water; and which will clasp us by the ankles one day, and draw us down. Do you ever think about it? If not, surely, surely you are leaving out of sight one of what ought to be the formative elements in our lives. And then, on the other hand, when our hearts are faint, or when the pressure of human mortality - our own, that of our dear ones, or that of others- seems to weigh us down, or when it looks to us as if God’s work was failing for want of people to do it, let us remember the other side. So we shall keep the middle path, which is the path of safety, and so avoid the folly of extremes. This double contemplation of the two processes under which we live ought to stimulate us to service. It ought to say to us, "Cast in your lot with that work which is going to be carried on through the ages. See to it that your little task is in the same line of direction as the great purpose which God is working out - the increasing purpose which runs through the ages." An individual life is a mere little backwater, as it were, in the great ocean. But the minuteness does not matter, if only the great tidal wave which rolls away out there, in the depths and the distance amongst the fathomless abysses, tells also on the tiny pool far inland and yet connected with the sea, with some narrow long fiord.

If my little life is part of that great ocean, then the ebb and flow will alike act on it and make it wholesome. If my work is done in and for God, I shall never have to look back and say, as we certainly shall say one day, either here or yonder, unless our lives be thus part of the Divine plan, " What a fool I was! Seventy years of toiling and moiling and effort and sweat, and it has all come to nothing; like a long algebraic sum that covers pages of intricate calculations, and the pluses and minuses just balance each other: and the net result is a big round nought." So let us remember the twofold process, and let it stir us to make sure that "in our embers" shall be "something that doth live," and that, not "Nature," but something better - God - remembers what was so fugitive. It is not fugitive ii it is a part of the mighty whole.