IT was growing dusk on a winter’s afternoon long ago; we were driving in country lanes, at some distance from home, and were not very sure of our way. Ah! here are cross roads, and there is a fingerpost — an old-fashioned wooden fingerpost or bishop, with its long arms spread out, one of them clearly indicating the turning we are to take, and thankfully availing ourselves of its information, we are soon hastening along the shortest road home. Had it not been for its aid, we might have lost our way.
Fellow-Christian, are you a fingerpost? Am I? We are in a world of darkness and wickedness, where many are going astray; but we are “light in the Lord” (Eph. 5:8), “children of the day” (1 Thess. 5:5), “the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14). Are we hiding our light, and ashamed to let it shine before men? If so, we are like a mutilated fingerpost which some mischievous person has robbed of its arms, that lie broken or strewn at its foot, while the bare stem remains, a sorry spectacle to passers-by of its uselessness. Such are we if refusing the place assigned to us by the Word of God. “The sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; holding forth the Word of life” (Phil. 2:15, 16). “Declared to be the epistle of Christ” (2 Cor. 3:3). We cannot get away from it; we are this or nothing. The Lord was all this and much more; to us He has given His place. “As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18). “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil” (1 John 3:10). We are not to be hid.
If a useless Christian resembles a fingerpost bereft of its arms, what shall be said of one pointing in the wrong direction? Such a finger-post has been seen, with arms reversed. If we are wearing the world’s livery, indulging ourselves in carnal pleasures, doing Satan’s errands, what are we? Like false fingerposts; confounding the Father and the world, heaven and hell. It is solemn, but true, and awful to think, that the arms that ought to be indicating the road to heaven, are pointing towards hell. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7:20), is it written; and if my feet are seen treading in the world’s ways, it is worse than futile to say that my heart is in heaven, and my home there. Neither can we walk on two roads at the same moment. “Ye cannot [not, ye would not] serve God and mammon.” In this day of heartless indifference to Christ, and of toleration of evil, may we be found with our loins girded and our lamps burning, and we ourselves like unto men who wait for their lord (Luke 12:36). Let us not be mistaken for world-lings, nor guilty of luke warmness. If people around us are not ashamed to wear ostentatiously the badge of certain societies, why should we shrink from the honor of being called “sons of God”?
H. L. H.