Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 26th

WATCHFULNESS

Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching. Verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.. - Luke 12:37

The first idea in watchfulness is keeping awake, and the second is looking out for something that is coming. Both these conceptions are intertwined in both our Lord’s use of the metaphor of the watching servant and in the echoes of it which we find abundantly in the Apostolic letters. The first thing is to keep ourselves awake all through the soporific night, when everything tempts to slumber. Even the wise virgins, with trimmed lamps and girt loins, do in some degree succumb to the drowsy influences around them, and, like the foolish ones, slumber, though the slumbers of the two classes be unlike. Christian people live in the midst of an order of things which tempts them to close the eyes of their hearts and minds to all the real and unseen glories above and around them and that might be within them, and to live for the comparatively contemptible and trivial things of this present. Just as when a man sleeps he loses his consciousness of the solid external realities, and passes into a fantastic world of his own imaginations, which have no correspondence in external facts, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision if but a poor cock shall crow, so the men who are conscious only of this present life and of the things that are seen, though they pride themselves on being wide awake, are, in the deepest of their being, fast asleep, and are dealing with illusions which shall pass and leave nought behind, as really as are men who lie upon dreaming couches and fancy themselves hard at work. Keep awake; that is the first thing, which, being translated into plain English, points just to this, that, unless we make a dead lift of continuous effort to keep firm grasp of God and Christ, and of all the unseen magnificences that are included in these two words, as surely as we live we shall lose our hold upon them, and fall into the drugged and diseased sleep in which so many men around us are plunged. It sometimes seems to one as if the sky above us were raining down narcotics upon us, so profoundly are the bulk of men unconscious of realities and befooled by the illusions of a dream.

Many of us have to acknowledge that the fervour of early days has died down into coldness. The river that leapt from its source rejoicing, and bickered amongst the hills in such swift and musical descent, creeps sluggish and almost stagnant amongst the flats of later life, or has been lost and swallowed up altogether in the thirsty and encroaching sands of a barren worldliness. Do not let your Christian life be like that snow that is on the ground - when it first lights upon the earth, radiant and white, but day by day more covered with a veil of sooty blackness until it becomes dark and foul. Even early failures, recognised and repented of, may make a man better fitted for the tasks which once he fled from. Just as they tell us that a broken bone renewed is stronger at the point of fracture than it ever was before, so the very sin that we commit, when once we know it for a sin, and have brought it to Christ for forgiveness, may minister to our future efficiency and strength.

The past is no specimen of what the future may be. The page that is yet to be written need have none of the blots of the page that we have turned over shining through it. The sin which we have learned to know for a sin and to hate teaches us humility, dependence - shows us where the weak places are; sin which is forgiven knits us to Christ with deeper and more fervid love, and results in a larger consecration.