Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: September 15th

THE DETACHMENTS OF FAITH

Ye are no more strangers and sojourners but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God, - Ephesians 2:19

Faith produces a sense of detachment from the present. "They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth."

Now, there are two different kinds of consciousness that we are strangers and sojourners here. There is one that merely comes from the consideration of the natural transiency of all earthly things and the shortness of human life; there is another that comes from the consciousness that we belong to another kingdom and another order. A "stronger’’ is a man who, in a given constitution of things, in some country with a settled government, owes allegiance to another king and belongs to another polity. A "pilgrim " or a " sojourner" is a man who is only in the place where he now is for a little while. So the one of the two words expresses the idea of belonging to another state of things, and the other expresses the idea of transiency in the present condition.

But the true Christian consciousness of being "a stranger and a sojourner " comes, not from any thought that life is fleeting and ebbing away, but from the better and more blessed operation of the faith which reveals the things promised, and knits me so closely to them that I cannot but feel separated from the things that are round about me. Men that live in mountainous countries, when they come down into the plains, be it Switzerland or the Highlands or anywhere else, pine and fade away, sometimes with the intensity of the " Heimweh,’’ the homesickness which seizes them. And we, if we are Christians, and belong to the other order of things, shall feel that this is not the native soil, nor here the home in which we would dwell. Abraham could not go to live in Sodom, though Lot went; and he and his son and grandson kept themselves outside of the organization of the society in the midst of which they dwelt, because they were so sure that they belonged to another. They "dwelt in tents because they looked for the City.’’

My brother! does your faith lessen the bonds that bind you to earth? Does it detach you from the things that are seen and temporal? or is your life ordered upon the same maxims, and devoted to the pursuit of the same objects, and gladdened by the same transitory and partial successes, and embittered by the same fleeting and light afflictions which rule and sway as the tempest sways the grass on the sandbanks, as the lives that are rooted only in earth? If so, what business have we to call ourselves Christians? If so, how can we say that we live by faith when we are so blind, and so incapable of seeing afar off, that the smallest trifle beside us blots out from our vision, as a fourpenny-piece held up against your eyeball might do the sun itself in the heavens there. True faith detaches a man from this present. If your faith does not do that, look into it, and see where the falsity of it is.