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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: September 8th

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SPIRITUAL DECLENSION AND CHANGE

Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this! and be ye very desolate, saith the Lord; for My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the Fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. - Jeremiah 2:12-13

It does seem inexplicable that if a man has once got a glimpse of the beauty, preciousness, and sweetness of Christ, His love and His power, his eyes should ever turn away or his heart ever become unfaithful. And yet it is the history of the Church as a whole, and of the individual members of it. As to the Church as a whole, how early it needed to be said, "Ye have left your first love"! and how constantly it has had to be repeated ever since! The apostles were not cold in their graves when grievous wolves began to enter in and spoil the flock. The law seems to work almost inevitably that close on the heels of every period of earnestness and quickened life there shall follow a period of reaction and torpor. However high the arrow is shot, the impulse that sped it on its way heavenwards soon seems to die, and gravitation begins, and down it comes again.

Look at Germany after the Reformation. Look at the England of the eighteenth century after the outburst of Puritanism. Look at the deadness that fell upon the first periods of this century after the strong new life of Whitefield and the Wesleys. Look all over the history of the Church, and you find the same thing. Then ask the question: Is there any more convincing proof of a living Christ than the fact that the Church has not been dead and buried long ago? And is there any better sign that Christianity is not of man than the fact that it has always been so hard for men to keep themselves for any length of time upon its level?

I am sure there is not a man or a woman reading this that has not had moments of illumination, when the conscience was quickened, and things that they thought they believed all their days flared out upon them with altogether strange and startling force and reality. And what has become of the moments, what has become of the impressions that were made upon us then? Where have they all disappeared to? and what is left behind when the heavens have closed again? Use and wont has gathered about us once more; the old opium soporifics that have lulled us to sleep so often have been quaffed again; and after the momentary illumination and expansion, we have fallen back into the miserable old ruts of half belief and whole indifference, and yet call ourselves Christians. I was reading in a book of African travel the other day that the great mountain-peak of Kilimanjaro will lie for weeks and weeks hidden behind the mists, except now and then in the morning, when, like an apparition, its wedge forces itself through the rolling vapour, and for half-an-hour it gleams there, the lord of the landscape; and then it is blotted out. How many of our lives in their morning hours had a vision, when the rolling lies, unsubstantial but opaque, which veiled the realities have been swept away, and for an instant you saw what is always there, whether you see it or not, the reality of God in Christ, His love and His work for you?

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