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Past spiritual experience need not be a memory only, nor need the claims of the future alarm us, in Christ we have never had or been our best, from age to age through the satisfaction of our mouth with good our youth may be renewed like the eagle's.

I. SPIRITUAL LIFE, THEN, MAY BE MARKED BY CONSTANT YOUTH.

1. Because youth's best features are of the very essence of the spiritual nature.

(1)  Conscious possibility.

(2)  Enjoyment of life.

(3)  Untiring strength.Christianity is constant youth, it brings youth's best features with it, as it increases the more spiritually youth-like we are, according to our Lord's principle that to grow in greatness in the kingdom of heaven is to grow towards the child.

2. Because spiritual life has never reached its maturity. The Christian can never say, The best is gone. With him, better experiences, and attainments, and service are to come.

3. Because its source is untouched by the deteriorating influences of earth. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." Thus it cannot die, Christ maintains it from Himself. For the same reason it never need decline.

II. WE SOMETIMES FAIL OF THE YOUTHFULNESS OF SPIRITUALITY. We need not. It is a grave dishonour to Christ to suppose that He cannot keep us from failing, and a great injury to ourselves to suppose that anything in the nature of the ease forbids unbroken Christian progress. Therefore, though what we speak of now is a fact, let us remember that it need not be, and is only due to sin.

1. It is so when we feel our chance is gone: "Time is the great enemy," said a statesman. And so we say of our religious possibilities, "Time is the great enemy" — it destroys what we might have been. In early life we form ideals, we determine then to conquer circumstances, and rise; time passes, and the ideal fades, we think then we can only be what circumstances let us.

2. It is so, too, when we miss the sacred powers and experience of other days. For "the days that are past," with some, "were better than these."

3. And it is so, when there is nothing youth-like in our piety.

III. THIS FAILURE IS REMEDIED BY PARTAKING OF DIVINE NOURISHMENT.

1. We have as much strength as we receive in nourishment, and no more. Every life has its proper food — vegetable life, animal life, human life, and so on; and if it be deprived of it, it fails till at last it dies. Our natural strength is the result of the food we have taken, and its maintenance, and increase, and revival depend on our feeding it. Now it is so with spiritual life, Christ is its food, "I," said He, "am the Bread of life," our life is in Him, the measure of our piety therefore is the measure of our reception of Him, we can have no more Divine life than we receive through partaking of Christ.

2. That, then, indicates the source of spiritual decline. Have we lost our youth? Have our powers, and possibilities, and joys vanished? It is due to this, and if we trace it back we shall find it so: we have neglected Christ.

3. That reveals the means of renewal. Christian young in years, and Christian young by the long retention of spiritual youthfulness, you will never grow old (faded and worn, I mean) in the Divine life, you will keep and increase your blessedness, if you but constantly feed upon Christ.

(C. New.)

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KJV: Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.

WEB: who satisfies your desire with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.