“To speak in terms of the simplest practicality,” he says,[1] “the living Christian will do anything rather than make his ‘life’ an excuse for indolence, and for want of method and self-discipline, in secret devotion; or for want of adoring reverence in the manner of it; or for neglect of the Written Word as a vital element in it, and as the one sure guide and guard of it all along. He will most specially take care that Christ is thus ‘in his life,’ in respect of morning intercourse with Him. His ‘morning watch’ will be a time of sacred necessity and blessed benefit. He will not merely confess the duty of ‘meeting God before he meets man.’ He will understand that he cannot do without it, if indeed he would deal with the unfolding day as it should be dealt with by one whose ‘life is hid with Christ in God’; one who possesses the priceless treasure of the blessed Union, ‘joined to the Lord, one Spirit,’ and who has his treasure at hand, in hand for use. And he will be not less watchful over his evening interview with Him who is at once his Master and his Life; coming with punctual reverence to Him who meanwhile liveth in Him, to report the day’s bond-service, to confess the day’s sins in contrite simplicity, to look again deliberately upon his Master’s face mirrored in His Word, to feel again the bond of the Union, tested and handled through the promises and then to lie down in the peace of God. And will he not see whether some midday interval, if but for a few brief minutes, cannot be found and kept sacred, for a special prayer and watch half-way? Such stated times are not substitutes for the spiritual attitude in which the ‘eyes are ever toward the Lord,’ but they are, I believe, quite necessary in order to the proper preparedness of the soul for that attitude, and for the right use, too, of all public and social ordinances. Nothing can annul the vital need of secret and deliberate communion with Him in whom we live, by whom we move.”
Next to the prayerful spirit, the habit of reverent meditation on God’s truth is useful in cultivating devoutness of life. It is commonly said around us that the old gift of meditation has perished out of the earth. And certainly there is much in our nervous, fussy times which does not take kindly to it. Those who read nowadays like to do it running. It is assuredly worth our while, however, to bring back the gracious habit of devout meditation. Says Jeremy Taylor in the opening page of his Holy Living, in his quaint, old-world words:
“The counsels of religion are not to be applied to the distempers of the soul as men used to take hellebore; but they must dwell together with the spirit of a man, and be twisted about his understanding for ever: they must be used like nourishment, that is, by a daily care and meditation; not like a single medicine, and upon the actual pressure of a present necessity.”
It is the same lesson that Mr. Spurgeon expounds in his illuminating way in a passage like the following:
“We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. Truth is something like the cluster of the vine: if we would have wine from it, we must bruise it; we must press and squeeze it many times. The bruisers' feet must come down joyfully upon the bunches, or else the juice will not flow; and they must well tread the grapes, or else much of the precious liquid will be wasted. So we must by meditation tread the clusters of truth, if
- ↑ Life in Christ and for Christ, p. 37.
