Hosea 13:9 O Israel, you have destroyed yourself; but in me is your help. I have long been convinced that many of our opinions and practices of these days differ enormously from the simple Gospel which Christ preached. I see but little hope for the re-animation of the true Christian ideal until God in His mercy raises up amongst us some prophet like Savonarola or Luther, or John Wesley, or some saint like St. Paul, or St. Francis, who is a saint indeed. Nothing is easier than to forget that religion means a good mind and a good life. Give me righteousness and not talk, conduct and not opinions, character and not ceremonies, love and not shams. I. DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE. In every religion there must be doctrine and practice. Christ came to show us that God's will is our sanctification. The age, the nation, and the Church, supremely need this lesson. "Get sincerity. Simplify your lives, simplify your religion; return to the simplicity which is in Christ Jesus. Whatever our belief may be, whatever our worship may be, unless we keep innocency, and do the thing that is right, we have missed the one thing, and only thing, which will bring any human being peace at the last." II. THE BRIDGE OF LIFE. There is on every side of us a false life, and on every side of us a sham religion. There is open to us all a blessed life and a real religion. Christianity in nearly all of us produces fruits so crude, so scant, so hunger-bitten, as to be little better than a store of Levitism or a godless heathenism. Christianity smitten through and through with the curse and the blight of our unreality, — that is the reason why it makes such little way, and is losing its hold of the masses of the population. Yet let us not despair. God judges not as man judges. III. HELP IN GOD. Life is short. There is nothing which the world, the flesh, or the devil can offer us which is not profoundly unsatisfying. Yet God who giveth more grace, can deliver us from that fraud or subtlety of the devil or man, which is the only final irremediable curse of our mortal lives. He can. give us. holiness; He can give us peace; He can give us happiness in Him. There m nothing to complain of in life, but only in ourselves, who pervert, and dwarf, and degrade, and poison it; and so God ever calls to us, and pleads with us through His Son, our Lord. "O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in Me is thy help." (Dean Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help.WEB: You are destroyed, Israel, because you are against me, against your help. |
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