THERE are many people who think that they are placed in this world for the sole object of enjoying themselves. Perhaps you, dear reader, are one of those who want nothing but pleasure. From anything that appears in the least degree serious, you fly as from a poisonous serpent. You are determined to make yourself happy and comfortable away from God. Anything that kills time is welcome to you and every day you want some new enjoyment. If such be your state, let me warn you at the outset that these very things you are striving for, are only such as will curse your very soul. In your blind folly and ignorant madness, you are bartering the unfathomable riches of the grace of God, the exquisitely tender love of our gracious Lord, and the eternal blessings of a ransomed soul, for a gaudy toy that perishes with the using. Oh, dear soul, I beseech you by the infinite love of God in Christ, to pause and consider before stern death cuts you off in your frivolity, and you are ushered into the all too serious scenes of endless woe.
How empty and hollow are these sinful pleasures! They are not solid. There is nothing in them to satisfy the immortal soul. Have you seen a soap-bubble floating in the sunshine? How bright and sparkling it is, even gorgeous as it appears tinted with all the colors of the rainbow! You are attracted by its beauty. You rush up and seize it. Ah! what have you? A filmy nothing. Such are the pleasures of the world. They fascinate you by their showy appearance, but soon you prove their emptiness. For instance: you see a placard announcing “Eleven hours’ amusement for one shilling.” You pay your shilling; you get your eleven hours. Surely now you have enough. This has slaked the soul’s thirst. Ah, no! strange to say, in quiet moments you feel an aching void which glitter and excitement cannot remove. It is an unwelcome sensation, and you strive to banish it by plunging deeper and deeper into revelry and mirth. But you cannot thus glut the desires of the soul: mere pleasures are like opiates, they simply create cravings for more. Like will-o’-the-wisps they lead only to the bogs and marshes of misery and destruction, eventually to an eternal hell.
By pleasure you endeavor to forget all about God, and heaven, and hell, hoping thus to escape somehow from the wrath you feel is coming. The ostrich, hardly pursued, thrusts its head into any small busk it sees, forgetting the rest of its body; it fancies thus to be safe from its enemies. Poor foolish bird! But a thousand-fold more foolish is he who attempts to screen himself from God by the flimsy veil of pleasure. At any moment the Judge of all the earth may tear it asunder and summon him by His dread messenger death to the next world, there to stand before Him in all the uncovered sinfulness of his secret self, and to receive the due reward of wickedness. Escape from God! Couldst thou range amid the eternal snows of either pole or wing thy way to a starry world, He were there! Where wilt thou fly from Him who “sitteth upon the circle of the earth” and spreadest out the heavens “as a tent to dwell in?” Thou and He must meet one day. Bless His name! It may be now, at this moment, in all the fullness of pardoning, forgiving grace. But if thou art careless it will he, must be then. THEN, when small and great stand before God and the books are opened and the sentence is passed “Depart from me, ye cursed.”
Which is it to be, sinner, now or then?
Pleasure is the bait the great enemy of souls uses to entrap his victims: He says to you in alluring, sympathetic tones, “Poor young fellow! Just see how you toil for seven or eight weary hours at the desk, the counter, or the bench. You want relaxation. Indeed nature demands that you should recuperate your taxed energies. Try a little harmless amusement.” How plausible it appears! You cannot resist and you advance towards the whirlpool of excitement. How pleasant the gentle current! Unsatisfied, you continue your gyrations until you are drawn into the madly circling waters, soon to be sucked into the vortex and thus to disappear in the mouth of hell.
Oh, may the God of all grace interpose and open your eyes to such cruel delusions of Satan. Does he not whisper in your ear of the pleasures of the theater? But did he ever add that there is no pleasure in hell? No; not he. He strews your path with gaudy delights that you may forget it leads to the lake of fire. He gives you the pleasures of sin “for a season” that you may lose those pleasures which are “for evermore.” He is a liar and a deceiver, and he exults in nothing less than the eternal perdition of his votaries.
Now, dear soul, what is your choice to be? A Saviour, who, despite your sinful, wanton ways loved you so much that He poured out His life’s blood on Calvary for such as you? Or the devil, who with a malignant hate first blinds your eyes with pretty pleasures, and then secures you as his companion through ages of endless torment. Is it to be heaven, or hell? Oh, this is an awful moment. You may never have another chance to make a choice. You may with your own lips, while you read these very words, seal your irrevocable doom; or with the same breath you may accept Christ as your Saviour, and with Him have pardon, peace, joy and blessings, more than tongue can tell. Choose! Choose the latter! Now, or it may be NEVER! W. J. H.