'They that wait upon the Lord'--that is the whole secret. What does
waiting on the Lord include? Let me put it in three brief exhortations.
Keep near Him; keep still; expect. If I stray away from Him, I cannot
expect His power to come to me. If I fling myself about, in vain
impatience, struggling, resisting providences, shirking duties,
perturbing my soul, I cannot expect that the peace which brings
strength, or the strength which brings peace, will come to me. It must
be a windless sea that mirrors the sunshine and the blue, and the
troubled heart has not God's strength in it. If I do not expect to get
anything from Him, He will not give me anything; not because He will
not, but because He cannot. Take the old Psalmist's words, 'I have
quieted myself as a weaned child,' and nestle on the great bosom, and
its warmth, its fragrance, its serenity will be granted to you. Keep
hold of God's hand in expectation, in submission, in close union, and
the contact will communicate something of His own power. 'In quietness
and in confidence shall be your strength.' The bitter contrasts may all
be harmonised, and the miraculous assimilation of humanity to divinity
may, in growing measure according to our faith, be realised in us. And
though we must still bear the limitations of our present corporeal
condition, and though life's tasks must still oftentimes be felt by us
as toils, and life's burdens as too burdensome for our feeble
shoulders, yet we shall be held up. 'As thy day so shall thy strength
be,' and at last, when we mount up further than eagle's wings have ever
soared, and look down upon the stars that are 'rolled together as a
scroll,' we shall through eternal ages 'run and not be weary' and 'walk
and not faint.'
THE SECRET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH
'Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall
utterly fall. 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.'--ISAIAH xl. 30, 31.
I remember a sunset at sea, where the bosom of each wavelet that
fronted the west was aglow with fiery gold, and the back of each turned
eastward was cold green; so that, looking on the one hand all was
glory, and on the other all was sober melancholy. So differently does
life look to you young people and to us older ones. Every man must buy
his own experience for himself, and no preaching nor talking will ever
make you see life as we see it. It is neither possible nor desirable
that you should; but it is both possible and most desirable that you
should open your eyes to plain, grave facts, which do not at all depend
on our way of looking at things, and that if they be ascertainable, as
they are, you should let them shape your lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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