Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: July 30th

THE DISCIPLINE OF HOPE

Wherefore, girding up the loins of your mind, be sober and set your hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. - 1 Peter 1:13.

"Gird up the loins of your mind." I suppose I do not need to do more than remind you that that figure, applied to travellers, to soldiers, to any men who have a hard task upon their hands, simply expresses the gathering together of all one’s powers, the training one’s self for given tasks. It suggests that there is a great deal in this life that makes it very difficult for us to keep firm hold of the facts on which alone a perfect hope can be built. Unless we tighten up our belt, and so put all our strength into the effort, the truths of the resurrection which beget to a lively hope, of the great salvation wrought by Jesus Christ, of the meaning and end of all our trials and sorrows, will slip away from us, and we shall be left at the mercy of the varying anticipations of good or evil which may emerge from the varying circumstances of the fleeting moment. We have, then, to gather ourselves up and set our teeth in the effort to keep hold of Christ, of His work, of its bearing upon ourselves, of the meaning of our sorrows, if we would not have like fluctuations in our heavenly to those which necessarily belong to our earthly hopes.

"Be sober." That means, not only gather yourself together with a consecrated effort, but "keep your heel well down on the necks of lower and earthly desires." The word, of course, points, first, to temperance - not, as we use it, only in respect to one form of sensual indulgence, but to temperance - in regard of all the animal necessities and desires. The fleshly lusts that belong to everybody must be subdued. That goes without saying. But, then, there are others more subtle, more refined, but not less hostile to the perfectness of a heaven - directed hope than are these grosser ones. We must keep down all the desires and appetites of our nature, both of the flesh and of the spirit. For we have only a certain quantity of energy to expend, and if we expend it upon the things of earth there is nothing left for the things above. If you take the river, and lead it all out into the gardens that are irrigated by it, or into the stream that drives your mills, its bed will be left bare, and little of the water will reach the great ocean which is its home. If a gardener wants a tree to grow high, he strips off the side shoots. Our hopes follow our desires. What we deem good is what we hope for; and if our desires all go trailing and grovelling along the earth, our hopes will never rise to the heavens. A gorged eagle cannot soar. Christian men whose heads and hearts are stuffed full of the trivialities of earth have little of the perfect hope which fastens on Christ.