A Lamp to the Path / Or, The Word of God in the Heart, the Home, the Workshop and the Market-Place

by W. K. Tweedie

But, on the other hand, are the lines of that young convert cast only amid trials, and not actual sins? Has He who appoints the boundaries of our habitations, appointed ours where faith is put to the proof, and the need of Almighty grace more clearly demonstrated? Then, by that grace, that young Christian must stand; even there it may be with him as it was with the three children in the tyrant’s furnace when it was heated seven times. The highest display of the power of truth, the brightest trophy to the triumph of grace, is to see some devoted believer holding fast the faith without wavering at the post of duty, alike against the scorn of the money-worshipper and the grossness of the unblushingly profane; and, blessed be God, his grace is sufficient even for that.

THE WORLD AN OBJECT OF PITY.

But farther: While the Christian, in his social intercourse, tries to shun the society of godless men, he is to make it plain that he shuns, because he loves them. We assume that that Christian will shun them; for he is bound to that by a law both in nature and in grace. But his motive is not that of spiritual pride. It has nothing akin to the feeling which dictated the words, “Stand by, for I am holier than thou;” nay, he is to show that he withdraws, because he cannot countenance what is ruinous to man and opposed to the mind of God. While we try to make religion felt, it must be the religion of love, and not of haughtiness or of bigotry. THE WORLD
AN OBJECT
OF PITY. We should remember that the world is a poor jaded world, and calls for pity rather than for wrath: its men have no resting-place either for the body or the soul; it has no antidote for its misery, no remedy for its disease. It is the shipwrecked seaman on his raft, trying to quench his burning thirst with the water of the ocean, only to make that thirst more burning still. It is the body weighed down with dropsy to the grave’s edge, yet seeking relief in what only augments its misery. And all that should awaken pity for the world in our intercourse with it. Be it made plain, that we can be no parties to the world’s ruin; we cannot trample on the Word of God to gratify the sinner’s love of sin. Nay, if we be Christians indeed, if we have in us the spirit of Him who died for the ungodly, we must love the sinner too well to countenance him in his ways. Our shunning of him, wherever duty will permit, is to be our silent protest against what the holy God so emphatically describes as “drowning men in perdition.” Love, wisdom, God, all demand that course.

THE WORLD’S DEADENING POWER.

And, to re-enforce all this, let it be remembered that we cannot associate of choice with wicked men without bringing our own religion into doubt. THE WORLD’S
DEADENING
POWER. Our relish for communion with God is blunted. Our love to the holy and the pure is lessened. The world to come fades away into dimness, and even a child of God is thus prone to catch the world’s spirit by intercourse of choice with worldly men. All this is notorious in regard to those haunts where the pride of life is pampered, and where the children of folly squander in frivolity or guilt the hours which are given to prepare for eternity and its joys. But it is true also of more ordinary social intercourse; and the man who loves his own soul will guard, by the grace of God, against the first approach to the world’s godless ways, as he would against the first drop in a poisoned cup, or the first inch of a stiletto.

THE TRUE LIGHT.

We feel, however, that we must repeat the warning—Be sure that you display the religion of love, not of bigotry, in separating from the world. THE TRUE
LIGHT. Let your light shine before men, but be sure that it is the true light—Heaven’s.—There is a vessel sweeping across the deep. It is night, and her hundreds on board are locked in the insensibility of sleep. But suddenly there is a collision, a crash; her timbers are breaking up; and the hundreds who slept so securely a few breaths before, are now screaming out their agonies as they sink to rise no more. And what caused that disaster and these watery graves? The man at the helm just mistook the light, and, in doing so, hurried some hundreds into eternity. In like manner, we may exhibit a false phase of Christianity which shall tend only to ruin. It may not be God’s light, but sparks which we ourselves have kindled, and these may only drive men nearer to destruction.

But hitherto we have done little more than attempt to show how and why they that fear God should separate from those who have no fear of Him before their eyes. We have endeavoured to show that a godly man cannot go down to the world’s level without dragging Christ’s religion along with him. We have been urging the followers of the Saviour never to let the world think that the Christian and it are the same in their likings and pursuits. If we leave the world under that conviction, we have given an uncertain sound, and we have therefore endeavoured to make it plain that there is a broad, clear, deep line drawn by the Eternal God between the world and the church—between the converted and the unconverted—the man who lives for earth and the man who lives for God. They do not pass into each other by imperceptible shades, like the colours of the rainbow; they are separated like mid-day and midnight; they are different in nature, in liking, in pursuits, and in end.

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.

THE
COMMUNION
OF SAINTS. All this, however, is only preparatory to telling how the godly should proceed in their intercourse with each other.—A prophet has said that “they who fear the Lord speak often one to another;” he has added, that “the Lord hearkens and hears,” and assured us, moreover, that “a book of remembrance is kept before the Lord for them that fear him and think upon his name.” Now, amid such employments, what can be the topics but the common salvation? What can engross the mind more than the death which Christ accomplished at Jerusalem, when he finished transgression, made an end of sin, and brought in an everlasting righteousness? What but the love of the Redeemer, and the mercies to which that love opened the way, can occupy such men’s souls? Holiness, and its author, the Spirit; grace, and its fountain, God; its channel, the Redeemer; glory, and the Almighty One who made it sure by his blood; that which is perfect “when the former things shall have passed away;”—these and kindred topics may well animate the souls and strengthen the faith of the people of God. It is amid employments like these that their hearts may burn within them, like the hearts of the disciples while they walked with the Saviour to Emmaus. It is thus that foretastes of the heavenly joys are obtained, thus that clusters are brought from Eshcol, and thus that the earnest of the purchased possession is at once secured and rejoiced in. To have a relish for such holy and hallowing employments, is a proof that we are born from above; our soul’s native land is there; and to have no such relish is a proof that the soul is dead to the holiest and the noblest things.