Dear young Christians! The time is short, the coming of the Lord draws near. 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. The crushing weight of indifference to the realities of heaven and hell, which is sinking thousands into everlasting ruin, needs no demonstration; and the lethargic state of the children of God with regard to the sending out of the gospel, the lack of desire for the lost, the absence of travail in prayer for souls, is none the less apparent and hardly less sad; yet may God arouse each one of us to a sense of eternal realities and of the need of “redeeming the time.”
Be in earnest, fellow Christians! True earnestness is only to be gained in one way: We must get near to the heart of God. His love kindles ours. His compassions for a perishing world moves our spirits. His Spirit stirs our souls and works in us and through us for the salvation of lost souls.
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. God does not want images, He wants men and women, with His love for souls, laboring in the gospel, and much in prayer before Him. It is no time for Christians to rust out of this world into heaven and rest.
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. What preacher ever told to the heart so well who and what the Savior is for His people, as the dying whispers of His beloved people?
Go to the death-beds of the lost. Those awful cries are a dread reality; that unutterable despair is no idle dream. There, too, shall the slackened spirit of the gospel worker revive in earnestness. From such scenes he will 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, yea, “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 a day of indifference we, too, may sleep among the dead? Because the night is far spent, shall its last hours be lost in idleness, self-seeking or vanity? Let us awake, be in earnest, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”