Expositions of Holy Scripture: Second Kings Chapters VIII to End and Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Esther, Job, Proverbs, and EcclesiastesMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Second Kings Chapters VIII to End and Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Esther, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
intelligible though one-sided. But God does not pall, and the more we
find Him the more we delight in Him; the highest bliss is to find Him,
the next highest is to seek Him; and, since seeking and finding Him
are never wholly separate, these kindred joys blend their lights in
the experience of all His children.
But our text lays emphasis on the whole-heartedness of the people's
seeking of God. The search must be earnest and engaged in with the
whole energy of our whole being, if any blessing is to come from it.
Why! one reason why the great mass of professing Christians make so
little of their religion is because they are only half-hearted in it.
If you divide a river into two streams the force of each is less than
half the power of the original current; and the chances are that you
will make a stagnant marsh where there used to be a flowing stream.
'All in all, or not at all,' is the rule for life, in all departments.
It is the rule in daily business. A man that puts only half himself in
his profession or trade, while the other half of his wits is gone
woolgathering and dreaming, is predestined from all eternity to fail.
The same is true about our religion. If you and I attend to it as a
kind of by-occupation; if we give the balance of our time and the
superfluity of our energy, after we have done a hard day's work--say,
an hour upon a Sunday--to seeking God, and devote all the rest of the
week to seeking worldly prosperity, it is no wonder if our religion
languishes, and is mainly a matter of forms, as it is with such hosts
of people that call themselves Christians.
Oh! dear brethren, I do believe there is more unconscious unreality in
the average Christian man's endeavour to be a better Christian than
there is in almost anything else in the world:--
'One foot on sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.'
That is why so many of us know nothing of a progressive strengthening
of our faith, and an increasing conquest of ourselves, and a firmer
grasp of God, and a fuller realisation of the blessedness of walking
in His ways.
'They sought Him with all their heart.' That does not mean, remember,
that there are to be no other desires, for it is a great mistake to
pit religion against other things which are meant to be its
instruments and its helps. We are not required to seek nothing else in
order to seek God wholly. He demands no impossible and fantastic
detachment of ourselves from the ordinary and legitimate occupations,
affections, and duties of human life, but He does ask that the
dominant desire after Him should be powerful enough to express itself
through all our actions, and that we should seek for God in them, and
for them in God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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