Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 29th

FUTURE ANTICIPATION

Looking for and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God. - 2 Peter 3:12.

Keep yourself awake first, and then let the waking, wide-opened eye, be looking forward. It is the very differentia, so to speak, the characteristic mark and distinction of the Christian notion of life, that it shifts the centre of gravity from the present into the future, and makes that which is to come of far more importance than that which is, or which has been. No man is living up to the height of his Christian responsibilities or privileges unless there stands out before him, as the very goal and aim of his whole life, what can never be realized until he has passed within the veil, and is at rest in the " secret place of the Most High." To live for the future is, in one aspect, the very definition of a Christian.

It is not for us, as it is for men in the world, to fix our hopes for the future on abstract laws of the progress of humanity, or the evolution of the species, or the gradual betterment of the world, and the like, - all these may be true; I say nothing about them. But what we have to fill our future with is that that same Jesus "shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go." No man can rightly understand the whole contents of the blessed proclamation, "Christ has come," unless he ends the sentence with "and Christ will come." Blessed is "that servant whom the lord, when he cometh, shall find watching."

Of course, I need not remind you that much for which that second coming of the Lord is precious, and an object of hope to the world and the Church, is realized by the individual in the article of Death. Whether Christ comes to the world or I go to Christ, the important thing is that there result union and communion, the reign of righteousness and peace, the felicities of the heavenly state.

And so, dear brother, just because of the uncertainty that drapes the future, and which we are often tempted to make a reason for dismissing the anticipation of it from our minds, we ought the more earnestly to give heed that we keep that end ever before us, and whether it is reached by His coming to us, or our going to Him, anticipate, by the power of realizing faith grasping the firm words of Revelation, the unimaginable, and - until it is experienced - the incommunicable blessedness revealed in these great, simple words, "So shall we ever be with the Lord."