Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 13th

AS WE SOW, WE REAP

They that plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. - Job 4:8

He that soweth iniquity shall reap calamity. - Proverbs 22:8

It is a solemn thought that the ultimate perfect possession of and by God is evolved from a germ which must be planted now if it is to flourish there. " The child is father of the man." Every present is the result of all the past; every future will be the result of the past and the present. Everybody admits that about this life, but there are some of us that seem to forget it with regard to another world. We know too little of the effect that is produced upon men by the change of death to dogmatise; but one may be quite sure that the law of continuity will go on into the other world. Or, to put it into plainer English, a man on the other side of the grave will be the same as he was on this side. The line will run straight on; it may be slightly refracted by passing from an atmosphere of one density to another of a different, but it will be very slightly. The main direction will be the same.

What is there in death that can change a man’s will? I can fancy death making an idiot wise, because idiocy comes from physical causes. I can fancy death giving people altogether different notions of the folly of sin; but I do not know anything in the physical fact of death, or in the accompanying alterations that it produces upon spiritual consciousness, in so far as they are known to us, that can alter the dominant bias and set of a man’s nature. It seems to me more likely that it will intensify that dominant bias, whatever it is; that it will make good men better and bad men worse when the limitations of incomplete organs arc gone. At all events, do not you run risks with such a very shaky hypothesis as that: but remember that what a man sows he shall reap; that the present is the parent of the future, and that unless we have the earnest of inheritance here, and pass into the other world bearing that earnest in our hands, there seems little reason why we should expect that, when we stand before Him empty-handed, we can claim a portion therein.

I was passing a little town garden a day or two ago, and the man had got a young weeping willow that he had put in the plot in front of his door, and he had bent down its branches and put them round the hoop of an old wine-cask to teach them to droop. And after a bit, when they have been set, he will take away the hoop, but the branches will never spring upwards, though it be gone, wherever you transplant the tree. Are you doing that with your souls? If you give them the downward set, they will keep it, though the earth to which you have fastened them be burnt up with fervent heat, and the soul be transplanted into another region.

If you have life, you will grow. If there be any real possession of the inheritance, it will be like the rolling fences that they used to have in certain parts of the country, where a squatter settled himself down upon a bit of royal forest, and had a hedge that could be moved outwards and shifted on by degrees; and from having begun with a little bit big enough for a cabbage garden, ended with a piece big enough for a farm. And that is what we are always to do, to be always acquiring, "adding field to field " in the great inheritance that is ours.