We are prone by nature to do what is wrong rather than what is right; we are born with passions wild and strong, and early give the reins to evil desires. By the strength of our animal propensities we are often carried to ruin unless we are arrested in our headlong and miserable career. Sometimes—nay, thank God, often—we are thus arrested. For a time, the voice of conscience may have been hushed. Our heart is cold and dead, and there is no spring of life in it at all. But something happens. We are led to think. We come to see the evil of our ways, the ruin that we are bringing on others as well as ourselves—on the wife whom we swore to love and cherish, the children whom we are neglecting, perhaps starving.
And then, all at once, it is borne in upon us that we must change our life's course. A bolt from heaven descends on us in the shape of some punishment or affliction. Our darkness and distress are revealed to us.
We seek the only refuge for the sinner. We flee to Christ, as the belated and weary traveller would flee to a hiding-place from the wind, a refuge from the storm, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. We become converted. In Christ we become a new creation. Oh, happy is it when we do so! Appalling and terrible it is when we do not. How sad and awful is the fate of one given over to the slavery, the bondage, the tyranny of some wicked habit! Unless such an one is visited by the grace of God, unless the heinousness of his guilt is brought home to him, unless divine light strikes in upon his darkened life, he will sink deeper and deeper into degradation, until, perhaps, he is driven to self-destruction like one of whom I lately read, and who left these terribly touching words behind him. "I am now about to finish a revolting, cruel, and wretched existence by an act of my own. I have broken every law of God and man, and can only hope that my memory will rot in the minds of all who knew me. Drink has brought me to this fearful end. I am dying hopeless, friendless, penniless and an outcast." And it might have been so different! Oh, that all who are giving way to any sin would listen to these terrible words of warning, that they would close at once with Christ's offer to make their lives different, to make them new creatures—once more fresh and fair creatures of God, that the old man with his corrupt affections and desires, be put off, and the new man in Christ Jesus be put on, that they would be in Christ!
To be in Christ—you know what is meant by that. You are in Christ if you are living in and by His Spirit; if you are breathing it into your life; giving it forth again, if your life is engrafted on His life as a branch is engrafted upon a tree. He is the Vine; we ought to be as the branches which thus derive their vitality, their beauty, their power of bearing leaf and fruit from the tree. The same soil nourishes it; the same dews feed it; the same breezes fan it. So we ought to have our life fed through Christ from God. If we are in Christ, we shall have the same hatred of sin as He had. We shall be removing ourselves further from evil; we shall ever be getting more like Christ, ever increasing in personal holiness and helpfulness to others, ever also willing to accept whatever He sends us, subordinating our weak, wayward wills to His holy and perfect will. If we let these words of charm, "In Christ," be written over our lives, we shall feel the old fetters fall off, the old unhappiness disappear, the old insubordination cease to assert itself.
(Photo: J. Moffat, Edinburgh.)
THE REV. W. W. TULLOCH, D.D.
We shall hardly know ourselves, the joy of the new life is so great. It is a joy, too, which we cannot keep to ourselves; we wish others to share our happy experience. We are constrained to wish this by the new and imperial impulse by which we are dominated. Because we carry heaven in our hearts we wish that others should do so, too. We look upon the sinner as upon some streamlet of water which is dwindling away day by day and will soon be dried up and the rocky channel left bare. Why? Because it is cut off from the fountain head, from the source away up in the hills near God's sky. And what we wish to do is to open the connection between the two, so that the stream may be fed and do what it is intended to do—flow along in full volume, making melody as it goes and fertilising the region through which it passes. In Christ, we are like the stream connected with its source: like it, we live melodious days and carry music to others. Or look at that branch separated from its parent stem; it is withering, it is dying. Again, a planet cut off from the central force and power—the sun—rushes through the dark night and is lost. So—if we be not in Christ, if we be separated from the true fountain, the living root, the centrifugal force—we shrivel up, we wither, we go to ruin here and hereafter, we die to all that makes existence tolerable and of value; and it might have been so different!
Shall we for the future, if need be, try to make life different to ourselves and others?
Then, if any of us become new creatures, the fact is at once recognised. People ask—What has come to So-and-so? His very appearance is changed; his gait, everything about him is altered for the better. He is regularly at his work and in his place in church. He has a pleasant smile and a kind word for everybody. His wife, who used often to look dull and unhappy, is now bright and cheerful. His children are better dressed than they were; they are more frank and free with him; they take his hand; they go to meet him when he comes home; they consult him about their little joys and sorrows. He is altogether quite different. What has come over him? Oh, the explanation is a very simple one: he has ceased to do evil, he has learned to do well. He has left some course of sin; he is following after a life of holiness. He has left the service of a bad master—the worst of all masters; he is now serving a new master—the best of masters. He has made the friendship of the best of friends; Christ is his master, his friend, his example. He is in Christ. That is the reason of the change, of the new creation. That is the reason of the sunshine he carries about with him, and which he scatters on others. He is like Christ Himself, for all true Christians carry Christ with them, wherever they go; just as every leaf we take off some plants, put into soil, will become a plant exactly like the parent stem from which it is taken, so the Christ-life in a man, if it be genuine, will reproduce its source and origin. The least tiny speck of musk, carry it where you may, diffuses the same kind of fragrance as the plant from which it came. So lives thus hid in Christ with God will be redolent of Him in all places and at all times.