Charles Spurgeon
1857
Philippians 1:21
Our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave.
The pulse that preserves our being beats our death march, and the blood which circulates our life is floating it onward to the deeps of death.
If you would get a fair estimate of the happiness of any man you must judge him in these two closely connected things, his life and his death.
Call no man happy until he is dead; because the life that is to come, if that be miserable, shall far outweigh the highest life of happiness that hath been enjoyed on earth.
I suppose that every man living has a model by which he endeavors to shape his life. When we start in life, we generally select some person, or persons, whose combined virtues shall be to us the mirror of perfection. “Now,” says Paul, “if you ask me after what fashion I mould my life, and what is the model by which I would sculpture my being, I tell you, it is Christ. I have no fashion, no form, no model by which to shape my being, except the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, the true Christian, if he be an upright man, can say the same.
This is the very age of conventionalities. People dare not now do a thing unless everybody else does the same. You do not often say, “Is a thing right?” The most you say is, “Does so-and-so do it?”
I would we had the courage to look upon a thing, not according to its age, but according to its rightness, and so weigh everything, not by its novelty, or by its antiquity, but by its conformity to Christ Jesus and his holy Gospel; rejecting that which is not, though it be hoary with years, and believing that which is, even though it be but the creature of the day, and saying with earnestness, “For me to live is not to imitate this man or the other, but ‘for me to live is Christ.’”
© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible
No comments:
Post a Comment