FELLOW Christians! The time is short, life hastens to its close; this New Year cries to us of days and months forever passed, of opportunities lost or missed, which will never return. Let us, then, in view of eternity, stir up our souls to fresh earnestness. We will not occupy our thoughts with what others say or do. The crushing weight of indifference to the realities of heaven and hell, which is sinking hundreds into everlasting ruin, needs no demonstration; and the lethargic state of the children of God with regard to the gospel, the lack of desire, the purposelessness or indirectness of prayer, and the absence of travail for souls, is none the less apparent, and hardly less sad; yet of these matters all we would now say is, God save each of us from taking eternal realities as matters of course, and from becoming ourselves as indifferent to them as the dead or the sleeping around us!
The only way to be of use for God in this world is personally to serve Him. We do not emulate any great work for God, or any movement on a large scale, but what we do desire for our readers and ourselves is, that each of us being moved by His grace should be doing his special work for Him. We plead with the individual Christian who reads this page, that he or she will set his or her spirit this New Year's day to the prayerful consideration of eternity. True missionary effort is the outcome of personal zeal for God.
God blesses earnestness, and true earnestness is a fruit of His Spirit. A genuine worker for souls is a love-gift from Him to the children of men. Wherever such a spirit burns it is a divine boon to the village or district where it is sent. It is not only light but heat, the light and warmth of love. Through such a heart God speaks. His love to sinners flows through the warm spiritual life-blood of His peoples' affections. It is marvelous grace, but He has put His Spirit in His people, and He gives His people to feel for sinners, to yearn for sinners, to weep and travail for their souls. It is, we repeat, the love of God moving the hearts of men for men. Through the very hearts of His servants God speaks, and commands the attention of the careless and indifferent.
Mere lucid gospel statements stir no souls; the cold, electric-light character of disseminating truth moves no hearts. It may edify understandings, it does not lay hold of spirits.
It shines about men and dazzles them; it does not, like the sun's rays, warm them. We want love as well as light. We do not need intelligence in order to be earnest, but God forbid that increase of intelligence should mean a diminishing of earnestness. Wherever such is the case, this is evident, that while the head has become filled with knowledge about God and the Bible, the heart has let God's love leak out.
Be in earnest, fellow Christians: a downright earnest gospel-worker, praying, yearning, determined by the grace of God to save souls, is the winner of the jewels for the Redeemer's crown. Zeal may perhaps blunder, and haste perchance stumble over a stone, but ten thousand times better to make mistakes in doing good than to live the lifelong, miserable mistake of doing no good.
True earnestness is only to be gained in one way: we must get near to the heart of God. His love kindles ours; His compassion for a perishing world moves our spirits. His Spirit stirs our souls, and works in us and through us for the salvation of men.
Love cannot but be active. Love asleep, while the objects of its affection are perishing, is but love's image; it is but a block of stone carved into the shape of the reality, and painted up to look like life. We do not want images, we want men and women laboring in the gospel. Helpers in the gospel in the abstract are of no use, they are dead weights in the life-boat, where every hand should be handling an oar, and every muscle be strained to rescue the perishing. We know that there are Christians like worn-out, pensioned-off steeds turned out to grass, who enjoy their fat things; but with infidelity stalking defiantly across the land, and superstition sapping the foundation of the gospel, it is no time for Christians to rust out of this world into heaven and rest.
We have said we do not suggest doing any great thing for God, for when the idea of doing some great thing fascinates the mind, the usual result is that nothing at all is done.
Begin with meditation. Meditate upon eternity. Pray about its realities, seek for grace to be possessed with its tremendous issues; then you will begin to act for eternity.
Take yet another step. Shut yourself in the chamber alone, and speak to God about eternity, with the name of one soul—a friend, a neighbor— upon your lips. Let that name and eternity be breathed together before God. Where will that person spend eternity? Think over it, pray over it, weep over it, and, possessed with the reality, you will not be able to avoid speaking to your friend about it.
Visit the sick and the dying. Death-beds are the most powerful sermons the living can hear. Those sweet testimonies to the love of Jesus, those visions of glory, those cheering words of Jesus to His own; ah! what preacher ever told to the heart so well who and what the Saviour is for His people, as the dying whispers of His beloved people?
Get you to the death-beds of the lost, you who make light of hell and eternal woe. Those awful cries are a dread reality; that unutterable despair is no idle dream. There, too, shall the slackening spirit of the gospel-worker revive in earnestness. From such scenes he shall arise and go forth, weeping fresh tears, to work afresh for sinners.
We plead for earnestness, and feel that, in so speaking, we are pleading for what God loves. Consider the tears of Jesus over rejecters of His grace; meditate upon His sighs, aye, how "He sighed deeply" over the unbelief of men; mark the energy of Paul and the apostles; see how the Holy Spirit wrought in them; and shall it be said that because we live in an indifferent day, we too may sleep among the dead? Because the night is far spent, shall its last hours be lost in idleness or disputes, in self-seeking or vanity?
Awake, awake I This New Year will be the last for many who read these pages; it may be the last which we shall ever see; before its close the Lord may come. H. F. W.