But what if sometimes you feel that you are not equal to all this? if when the voice cries, “What doest thou here?” you have no answer to give? It is good for us in such a case to turn and see how God dealt with His prophet, how He made him come forth and stand on the mount before him. The Lord passed over him, revealing His presence in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, revealing it yet more intimately in the sound of the still small voice. So He sent Him out again with a new commission; and so we, too, may learn our lesson, if we care to learn it. And the lesson is this, that God renews our wavering strength, that He lifts up our drooping spirit, and opens our dull eyes and gives us afresh the hearing ear, by communion with Himself. In the solitude of the mount of God, through the symbols of His power, and in the sound of the inner voices, in meditation, in prayer, we may
find those refreshing influences which give us new strength, new thoughts, new notions of God and duty, and send us out afresh to do His work in new service to Him.
We may follow His teaching to Elijah a little further. The new message to him began, “Return on thy way”—do such and such things. The new message is, in fact, just as always, a new call to old duties—“Return on thy way.” And so it is for you and me. After the vision of God comes the plain and homely work to do, as we walk in old ways, and have to meet all our old dangers and difficulties. Has any one of us ever shrunk from any post of duty in life, or strayed from any straight course? Then if God has in His mercy visited us with the warning call, “What doest thou here?” or laid the call of a new message upon us, it is almost sure to have been a call to return and take the straight path, or to take our stand at the deserted post. And if it should ever happen to us that the duty which looks too hard is, as indeed it happens very often, some duty of
our social life, should we feel as if the world were against us, and we were standing alone, let us not forget God’s word of final encouragement to his prophet, “Yet have I left me seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed to Baal.”
It is a word for all time. If ever you are fighting for the good, and growing weary in the fight, the thought may rise in you that you seem to be fighting alone, and that everything is against you, just because you cannot see the seven thousand who are in the same ranks, and on your side.
In the darkest hour of Israel’s history we are thus told of an indefinite multitude who had stood firm in the faith of their fathers, untouched and untainted by adverse influence, and the recollection of it should serve to strengthen and encourage every individual who is really jealous for that which is good.
Let us, then, take the warning, and nurse it as a gift of God, and go forward where duty calls us, sometimes faint, it may be, and sometimes weary, but still pursuing.
VII. PRIVATE PRAYER, AND PUBLIC WORSHIP.
“And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.”—St. Luke iv. 16.
“He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed.”—St. Mark i. 35.
These two texts set before us our Saviour’s habit in regard to public and private spiritual exercise; and they suggest to us the question, What have we, on our part, to say of these two elements in our own life? These texts, we bear in mind, represent not something casual or intermittent in the life of our Lord. They stand in the record of it as a typical, essential, inseparable part of His habitual practice. What we have to remember about them is that, whereas all men recognise in the life of Jesus the one unique example in human history of a life which is morally perfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the