John 10:3-5 To him the porter opens; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out.… 1. A strange question has come under discussion - "Is life worth living?" - strange, until we recollect that a prevalent philosophy has as its main theses that life is not worth living. It is not hard to trace the genesis of this. When one begins to doubt the goodness of God, one begins to doubt if life has much value. 2. This question is very audacious. We might perhaps question a future of life; but this points life itself with an interrogation, and, answered in the negative, involves the wish that both created and the Creation were blotted out. But to empty and then annihilate the universe is an audacity that sinks to the ridiculous. "Oh, that I had never been born!" said one. "But you are born, and you cannot help it," was the truly philosophical reply. A philosophy that flies in the face of the inevitable forfeits its name. 3. The proposition to get rid of this undesirable life need not awaken concern; the greater part will prefer to live it out to the end. And then it may be impossible to escape by so-called self-destruction. We may throw ourselves over the battlements of the life that now is, but who can say that we may not be seized by the mysterious force that sent us here and be thrust back into this world or into one no better. If extinction is desirable we must suppose a good God, for no other would permit it. But will He not rather deliver from the misery and preserve the life? 4. It is not amiss that the question has come up, for it has turned the thought of the age to the good as well as to the evil of life. That there are gains and losses there is no question — which, then, are in excess? I. Let us make A COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF THE LOSS AND GAIN OF LIFE AS WE PASS OUR ALLOTTED YEARS. We must start with the fact that but one kind of excellence seems possible at a time. We never see a person simultaneously at the height of personal beauty, energy and wisdom. One excellence follows another. But we must not infer that as one phase passes away that there is actual loss; there may be a succession characterized by an ascending grade, that life represents an unquenchable force, can never be less than it is, and thus be its own excuse for being. 1. We lose the perfection of physical life, its grace and exuberance — yet only to gain firmer hold of it. The child is guileless by nature, the man because he has learned to hate a lie. The child is joyous, it knows not why; the man's joy is the outcome of his nature reduced to harmony. 2. We lose the forceful, executive qualities. We no longer undertake arduous enterprises or heavy responsibilities; the needed energy is gone, but it may have been transmuted as motion is into light and heat. 3. In the mental qualities there is smaller loss. Fancy decays, but with the example of Milton and others before us we can hardly say imagination, but the judgment grows broader and the sense of truth keener and the taste more correct later on. 4. In moral qualities there is no loss at all. The order is significant, the physical changes utterly, the mental partially, the moral not at all if the life is normal. II. WHAT DO WE GAIN AS LIFE GOES ON? 1. This evident progress from the lower to the higher must be accounted a gain. It does not matter how this progress is made, whether by actual loss of inferior qualities supplanted by higher, or by a transformation of forces, though the latter is more in accordance with science which asserts that force is indestructible. None of us would choose to go back to any previous phase to stay. We may long for the innocence of youth, but who would take it with its ignorance; for its zest, but not at the expense of its immaturity; for the energy of mid-life, but not at the cost of the repose and wisdom of age. 2. Though we lose energy, courage, and present hope we gain in patience, and on the whole suffer less. This is a gain over the untested strength and false measurements of earlier year's. 3. We make another gain as thought grows calm and judgment rounded to its full strength. Knowledge becomes wisdom, passion and prejudice pass, and we gain in comprehensiveness, and so lose the spirit of partizanship. 4. There is great gain in later life in certain forms of love and sympathy. The passion and semi-selfishness of early love, and the restriction and prejudice of early sympathy pass away, but both become stronger, purer, calmer and more universal. The old are more merciful than the young; they judge more kindly and forgive more readily. Hence they are poor disciplinarians, but they are not called to that duty. 5. There is also in advanced life a mingling of the faculties. Thought has more faith in it and faith more thought; reason more feeling and feeling more reason; courage more prudence, and prudence more courage. An old man does not feel so much rapture before a landscape as one younger, but he sees it with more eyes. This cooperation of all the faculties is like the Divine mind in which every faculty interpenetrates every other, making God one and perfect, and is an intimation that he is getting ready for the company of God.Conclusion: 1. If life can start at the point of mere existence and thence grow up into likeness of God, it is worth living. And if life reaches so far, we may be sure it will go on. 2. This line of thought has only force in the degree in which life is normal. That it is not such is true, but there is provision in humanity against its own failures, for One is in it who can fill its cup to overflow. (T. T. Munger.) Parallel Verses KJV: To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. |
    |