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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 5th

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THE HEAVY COST OF THE WORLD

What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? - Mark 8:36

You get nothing for nothing in the world’s market. It is a big price that you have to pay before these mercenaries will come to fight on your side. Here is a man that "succeeds in life," as we call it. What does it cost him? Well, it has cost him the suppression, the atrophy by disuse of many capacities in his soul which were far higher and nobler than those that have been exercised in his success; it has cost him all his days; it has possibly cost him the dying out of generous sympathies and the stimulating of unwholesome selfishness. Ah! He has bought his prosperity very dear. If people would estimate what they pay for gold, in an immense majority of cases, in treasure that cannot be weighed and stamped, they would find it to be about the dearest thing in God’s universe; and that there are few men who make worse bargains than the men who give themselves for worldly success, even when they receive what they give themselves for.

Some of you know how much what you call enjoyment has cost you. Some have bought pleasure at the price of innocence, of moral dignity, of stained memories, of polluted imaginations, of an incapacity to rise above the flesh; and some have bought it at the price of health. The world has a way of getting more than it gives.

At the best, if you are not Christian men and women, whether you are men of business, votaries of pleasure, seekers after culture and refinement, or anything else, you have given Heaven to get earth. Is that a good bargain? Is it much wiser than that of a horde of naked savages that sell a great tract of fair country, with gold-bearing reefs in it, for a bottle of rum and a yard or two of calico? What is the difference? You have been fooled out of the inheritance which God meant for you; and you have got for it transient satisfaction, and partial as it is transient. If you are not Christian people, you have to buy this world’s wealth and goods at the price of God and of your own souls. And I ask you if that is an investment which recommends itself to your common sense. Oh, my brother "what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself?" Answer the question.

Only he that is "a man in Christ" has come "to the measure of the stature of a perfect man." There, and there alone, do we get the power which will make us full-grown. There alone does the soul get hold of that good soil in which, growing, it becomes as a rounded, perfect tree, with leaves and fruits in their season. All other men are half-men, quarter-men, fragments of men, parts of humanity exaggerated, and contorted, and distorted from the reconciling whole which the Christian ought to be, and in proportion to his Christianity is on the road to be, and one day will assuredly and actually be, a "complete man, wanting nothing"; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realization of the ideal of humanity, the renewed copy " of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven."

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