Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIVMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
These incoherent, instinctive, unreflective lives that so many of you
are living are a shame to your manhood, to say nothing more. God has
made us for something else than that we should thus be the sport of
circumstances. It is a disgrace to any of us that our lives should be
like some little fishing-boat, with an unskilful or feeble hand at the
tiller, yawing from one point of the compass to another, and not
keeping a straight and direct course. I pray you, dear brethren, to
front this question: 'After all, and at bottom, what is it I am living
for? Can I formulate the aims and purposes of my life in any
intelligible statement of which I should not be ashamed?' Some of you
are not ashamed to do what you would be very much ashamed to say, and
you practically answer the question, 'What are you seeking?' by
pursuits that you durst not call by their own ugly names.
There may be many of us who are living for our lusts, for our passions,
for our ambitions, for avarice, who are living in all uncleanness and
godlessness. I do not know. There are plenty of shabby, low aims in all
of us which do not bear being dragged out into the light of day. I
beseech you to try and get hold of the ugly things and bring them up to
the surface, however much they may seek to hide in the congenial
obscurity and twist their slimy coils round something in the dark. If
you dare not put your life's object into words, bethink yourselves
whether it ought to be your life's object at all.
Ah, brethren! if we would ask ourselves this question, and answer it
with any thoroughness, we should not make so many mistakes as to the
places where we look for the things for which we are seeking. If we
knew what we were really seeking, we should know where to go to look
for it. Let me tell you what you are seeking, whether you know it or
not. You are seeking for rest for your heart, a home for your spirits;
you are seeking for perfect truth for your understandings, perfect
beauty for your affections, perfect goodness for your conscience. You
are seeking for all these three, gathered into one white beam of light,
and you are seeking for it all in a Person. Many of you do not know
this, and so you go hunting in all manner of impossible places for that
which you can only find in one. To the question, 'What seek ye?' the
deepest of all answers, the only real answer, is, 'My soul thirsteth
for God, for the living God.' If you know that, you know where to look
for what you need! 'Do men gather grapes of thorns?' If these are
really the things that you are seeking after, in all your mistaken
search—oh! how mistaken is the search! Do men look for pearls in
cockle-shells, or for gold in coal-pits; and why should you look for
rest of heart, mind, conscience, spirit, anywhere and in anything short
of God? 'What seek ye?'—the only answer is, 'We seek _Thee_!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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