HOW often has the voice of the guard at the window of the railway carriage, asking, “Are you for London?” roused us to the consciousness that the end of our journey was near!
Let me change the form of the question Christian reader, and ask, “Are you for heaven?” “Of course,” you reply, “or I should not be a Christian.” I know that, but I still ask, “Are you for heaven? Is it the place you are intent upon—living for?” Men of business who travel to town every day become so accustomed to the journey that at last they observe nothing by the way, and pay no heed to what is on either side of them. But the Christian travels to heaven knowing that every step of the road is of interest to him, and to his Lord, but set upon the goal which seems nearer and dearer to him as he presses on.
I know an old carrier in the country who travels every day of his life, except Sunday, twenty-four miles to a distant town behind a slow horse doing wearisome work on the same oft-traveled road. Shall I tell you the burden of his song? As his horse plods along, you may hear him constantly humming to himself—
“Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day’s march nearer home.”
Over and over again, day after day, he repeats the same words, “A day’s march nearer home.”
“The sleep of the laboring man is sweet.” A working man values rest, and when Saturday comes how gladly he says, “It’s Sunday tomorrow.” In fact it may almost be said that through the week he lives for Sunday. Fellow Christian, is the prospect of rest sweet to us? and are we laboring to enter God’s rest? Oh! how sweet will it be to sit down and see the Master come forth and serve us! None but laborers know the pleasure of sitting down.
As in olden times they discovered the fugitive Ephraimites by their way of pronouncing “shibboleth,” so now the manner of speech of one who is set for heaven betrays him distinctly; like the worthies of old, such “declare plainly that they seek a country,” a heavenly one.
Have you ever noticed the different way an old horse performs an outward from a homeward journey? When going away from his home he may flag and apparently weary of the way: but how differently is the homeward journey made I well remember an old favorite who would start on his seventeen miles’ journey home with fresh energy, and spring, and freedom, as though at every mile he said to himself, “I’m going home.” Shall we be less conscious that we are going home than one of God’s dumb creatures? “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib, but.... My people doth not consider,” has too often to be said of us. Oh! it is worthwhile reaching heaven. “Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest,” and then the glad answer of our hearts and lives to the question, “Are you for heaven?” may truly be— “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth, for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.”
H. L. H.