Isaiah 40:31 But they that wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary… This movement from the wing of the eagle to the foot of man is no descending path, no record of decaying spiritual vigour, but rather the ascending line of life. 1. Religion is not some highly wrought emotional experience — rare, ecstatic, lifting us into the seventh heaven; but an accession of permanent spiritual power to enable us to do the work of our everyday life and grow in the grace of a normal Christian character. In the common experience of man all true religion begins on the soaring wing of some strong emotion, some wave of feeling that comes over the heart for mercies received. It was as Moses when God met him in the desert of Horeb and showed him the burning bush, a rare sight, a moment of vision of heavenly things from which all future experiences were to be dated. The common lot of man falls upon the believer; the moment of thrill and ecstasy passes away. Moses has to go down to Egypt among the politicians and do the hard work and drudgery of life. Is, then, the ecstasy a waste of force? Moses, as he turned to the worrying work of rounding up the Israelites for the long journey over seas and across the desert, may frequently have thought that God s service had not procured for him either the ease or the honour that the ecstatic experiences of the burning bush had promised. But when we look back on the life and work of the great statesman we can see that the burning bush was but an ancillary incident in a great moral career; and that the patient, daily labour, the unflinching loyalty to duty, which for forty years had to be pursued in all weathers and in all moods, are the facts that loom large like mountain peaks in this great life. It was to warm his heart and inspire his spirit for those days of toil and nights devoid of ease that the vision was given. It was precisely the same truth that we find illustrated in the religious experience of the apostle Paul. His spiritual life began with a celestial vision; and in its upward development he came, not to more and clearer visions, but to the perception of a sanctity and nobility which lay in the common work of life. The Christian man as father and priest in his own household hallows his home by the benediction of his morning prayers. You do not regard your morning prayer as false and futile because during the day you cannot live up to all your own high ideals. The aspiration to be better is itself the accession of power to do better. This truth, so full of the poetry of passion and the deepest philosophy of life, is brought to us with wonderful force and tenderness in Hogg's "Skylark." The wild abandon of feeling that carried the songster so far into the sky was not frenzy nor foolishness because he had to come back and gather worms for the nestlings. On the contrary, there had been no nestlings but for the emotion that produced that song. And the song of rapture found its crowning glory in the lowly service of the obscure nest. 2. The intellectual man is in danger of disparaging the emotions and of setting aside the mysticism and ecstasy of the soul as mere fancies and dreams. But the emotional man is in still greater danger of regarding them as the only kind of religious experiences worth seeking after, the only evidence of true religion in the heart, and certainly the glory of the Christian life. In a word, the emotional man regards the glory and crown of life to be the rapture and ecstasy of the love and faith, and not the works and character which these feelings should produce. He mistakes the means for the end. In the effort to correct this mistake we must go the length of saying that love to and trust in Christ are not religion at all; just as seeds are not trees. They become religion only as they are transmuted into Christian character in the daily work and warfare of the common life. It is of vital importance that people should understand the laws of life in regard to the relation of emotions to acts. Pleasure is not an end, but the servant of higher and nobler ways of living. Nature provides that eating and drinking shall be a pleasure to man; but what is the man called who cares merely for the pleasure of eating; who lives to gratify his appetites and never does an honest day's work for the food he consumes? No deeper stain, no more deadly practice can come into our life than the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. The moment you love the excitement more than the work, so that you come soon to steal the excitement and shirk the work, nature revenges herself on you by making all such work as you are forced to do a drudgery instead of a pleasure. I have heard hard-working wives and mothers say, "I have lost my religion! I have so many little children to care for, so many duties in the home that I cannot get to church." Is not this mother's care and self-sacrifice for her children her religion? What did she love and trust Christ for? That she might gad about at religious meetings, or that she might bring up her little ones m the fear of God? She and her child, with the sense of the presence of the Father-God, make that nursery the holiest of shrines. If a youth should learn mathematics and mensuration in school for the purpose of making him a surveyor, and then be sent out into the prairies or the Rocky Mountains for six months to apply his theoretical knowledge to the practical work of his profession, you would pronounce him crazy if, when he came back with a successful survey of the region, he should say, "Yes, that is good work, but I have lost my mathematics; I was not in a school all those six months." The mathematics were a means to an end. If faith and love to God are spiritual things, then their glory lies just in this — that they are not dependent outlines and places, on churches, on moods or sentiments. It is not the state of "feeling good" that makes a man a humble, true Christian, but the act of doing good. Faith and prayer and the emotional exaltation of the church service are only the raw material out of which religion is made. Religion is life, and the deepest and grandest of all the realities of life. Life is known and expressed only as we test and try the religious emotions in all those various phases of business and social activity. The eagle's wing can carry me far, but it is in danger of leaving me remote, and so out of touch with common men and common interests. I want to be able to walk without weariness, to sympathise with plain people, to enter into the lowly door of pity, to keep company with the plodding man on the highway, and the toilers in the field. (D. Beaton, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. |
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