Matthew 14;22
Dear Reader, I want you to look at this. Not for a few minutes, or half-an-hour; but hour by hour, and day by day. I would have you fix your gaze up and away to the other side of death—the other side of judgment; and if you be a true Christian, on the glory awaiting you on the blissful shores of Immanuel’s land! Every child of God knows that they are traveling to the other side, that it is their privilege and blessing to say, with a thankful heart, “We are now no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens of the saints, and of the household of God.” “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” (Heb. 13:14) Oh! what a wonderful and glorious mystery it is that we should be called the “Sons of God,” and if sons, heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ! and oh! blessed word! “inheritors” of the kingdom of heaven. But I think that many Christians forget, or seem to forget, that they are on the way to their Father’s house! Oh! that these few feeble words may stir them up to live more as the followers of Jesus on, to live, letting their light so shine before men, that seeing their good works, they may glorify their Father who is in heaven. When the disciples were with Jesus, we learn, because it was a “desert place” He “constrained His disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side.” And so He still does to those who are His. There are some who follow Him closely—,who are daily and hourly in communion with Him, as His disciples were; and to those He says, “As you know that you are mine, and all that I have is yours, set your affections on things above and not on things on the earth.” “Let not your hearts be troubled, ye believe in God; believe also in me.” “Look away from all the cares and surroundings of this life and look up and away to the other side—to the glory in store for you there.” Yes, beloved, so God would have us live, looking with a fixed eye, as it were, into heaven itself; entering by faith into the very holiest, relying on His promise, “My presence shall go with thee,” and believing that though here we may have trouble and weariness, still, in the end, “He will give us rest.” (1 Tim. 33:14) What a precious promise is that one also for the believer, in Isa. 43:2, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” This is a strong staff to lean upon, is it not, dear reader? and have we not much to comfort and cheer us on our upward journey The way home may be very long and dreary—the road may be very dark and rough; but when we remember that our sufferings here are but for a “moment,” we will be able to sing that sweet little line from our heart.
“Oh! how will recompense his smile,
The suff’rings of this little while.”
And oh! shall it not, beloved! Shall it not amply more than recompense us for any little trials and sufferings we may have borne here silently, maybe patiently, rejoicing that we were counted worthy to suffer for His sake? Shall it not when we see his tender smile beaming upon us, and hear his loving commendation, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
Oh! when we are in the glory on the other side, and can survey from the glorious battlements of the New Jerusalem, all the way which the Lord has led us, how we will wonder at all the care and anxiety, all the trouble and fretting, which our little life down here cost us; and how we will grieve to see others (as we had often done) toiling and striving to gain some paltry height in the world’s estimation, or wearing themselves out with their efforts to lay by stores for days which may never arrive. Oh! dear friends, I do not say that we should not be careful about our worldly affairs, that we should let things go to “rack and ruin,” as the saying is, and not try to make them better; but I do say that a Christian should have the same characteristics as had the Nazarite of old; and let the unshaven head and loosely flowing locks be typical of their utter carelessness and disregard of mere worldly position and eminence. While time lasts, there will be Marthas in this world, troubled, and ever anxious about the affairs of this life: but oh! how much more blessed to be like Mary! thinking but of Jesus, learning of Him, and sitting at His feet. Oh! dear Christian reader, though your worldly prospects may be very poor, though you may be sad and weary and lonely, surely the same thought that sustained our blessed Master through all His years of loneliness and sorrow, ought to cheer you in yours! Remember, “He for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Heb. 12:2). Even so, then, think of the glorious prospect that is before you, even the same set before Him; for He says, “To him that overcometh, will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in His throne.” (Rev. 3:21) And we know that now we are “more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”
Oh! dear Christian, when you think of the bliss that is awaiting you on “the other side,” the little troubles and trials you experience on your homeward journey, will all fade like the morning mist? Would that we could all keep our eyes more steadfastly fixed upon that distant shore! Would that we walked more upon the mountain tops, watching and waiting for the bright and morning star to arise. Oh! that we could think less of our own trials and afflictions, (though they may sometimes appear as if they would overwhelm us); and, raising our eyes, trustfully see that “behind a frowning Providence, He hides a smiling face;” and that everything—trials, losses, temptations, sorrows, all things work together for good to them that love God. Then he would walk with a firmer tread the path, it may be, a sorrowful one; but, as the days and months fly by—an ever shortening one, which leads to our eternal home.
Oh! then, let us strive, beloved, to live more daily and hourly, “looking unto Jesus,” or, rather, “looking of unto Jesus.” (Heb. 12:2) Looking off from all other objects—worldly and earthly cares and concerns—unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. “Looking off” from all the temptations of pleasures which would lure our hearts from resting above, and looking with a single eye and steadfast faith, unto Him who, “for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” And let our eyes and our hearts be fixed upward and onward and heavenward and homeward, to “the other side,” and the pleasures which “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Oh! then, amidst life’s hot and weary race, let us often invigorate and refresh ourselves by the thought of the time when we will be “forever with the Lord,” and live so that when the summons home reaches us, gladly striking our tents, and bidding farewell to our wilderness life, we may be ready to enter the land of promise—the house of our Father in heaven.
Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him we roam
Yet nightly pitch our moving tent
A day’s march nearer home.
My Father’s House on high,
Home of my soul, how near
At times, to faith’s transpiercing eye,
Thy golden gates appear.
My thirsty spirit faints
To reach the land I love—
The bright inheritance of saints!
Jerusalem above.
A.