| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 9 |
Page 2 |
Yet there are a great many good people who have not yet learned the secret of peace. There are Christian men in business, and in the midst of life’s affairs, who are always full of care, fearful of the outcome of their ventures, restlessness, tossed on the bosom of life’s rough sea like leaves on the billows. There are women, Christian women, who love Christ and read their Bible, and pray, and partake of the Lord’s Supper, and work in the Sunday school, and in missionary societies, and who are very dear to Christ, yet whose lives are certainly full of little anxieties. They are easily annoyed. Their faces show lines of care and fret. Now and then they have brief seasons of restful trust, when they seem to have gotten the victory, but in a little time they are back again in the old broken restlessness.
This is not the best the religion of Christ can do for us. More than two hundred and fifty times does the word “peace” occur in the Bible. St. Paul, the homeless, hunted, suffering apostle, used it more than forty times, writing it oftentimes in prison, with a chain rattling on his wrist as he wrote. One of our Lord’s sweetest farewell words was, “Peace I leave with you;” and when he came from the grave, three times did the benediction fall from his lips: “Peace be unto you.” The ideal life for a believer in Christ is one of peace.
It is very evident that this life of peace is not a life without care. Christ nowhere suggests the thought that his disciples are lifted out of the common conditions of early life into a sheltered pilgrimage, where the storms do not beat upon them, where sickness and pain do not reach them, where there are no disagreeable people to live with and no adversities and disappointments to mar the calmness and quietness of the life from year to year.
He said expressly that he did not want his disciples taken out of the world. The Christian is called to live in the midst of the ordinary conditions of life. The winds blow no more softly for him. Bad people are no more gentle because one of God’s children is beside them. Sickness turns not away from a home because one of Christ’s little ones dwells there. Circumstances are no more kindly because it is a Christian who is being hurt by their pitiless grind.
Page 2