Thoughts on the Spiritual Life - IX - H. C. G. Moule

Chapter 2, cont'd.

Shall I touch on other things, not expressly named in this passage (Eph. 4: 1,2,31), but all too often known in Christian circles? Irreverence about the Name and Presence of the holy and blessed God is one of them; I have alluded to it already (p. 32). In President Edwards’ account of the great revival at Northampton, in New England, early last century, there is a remarkable passage to this effect, in the complete edition of the Narrative. That revival approached, or seemed to do so, to what I know not where else to find recorded, the conversion of a whole town; and the manifestations of grace, as testified to by the great Christian thinker who wrote the story, were wonderful indeed. Describing one singularly beautiful case of fully sanctified life, he speaks of the person in question as bowed down in deep penitence under a sense of sin involved in one mention of the name of God without adequate reverence. Such a bowing down was better than an unchastened exaltation. Take a lesson of holy Abstinence from it.*

Another familiar inconsistency of our Christian life, I fear, is an unthrifty use of time, that mysterious talent which, unlike other talents, does not grow, but is spent, in the using. Let us not use it with a weary anxiety, but let there be a grave habitual remembrance that it and we are in His hands for whom we exist, to whom we equally belong whether we toil or whether we rest. From useless indolence, small or great, let us totally abstain, through grace.

And let us abstain totally henceforth from the neglect of secret communion with the Lord. Nothing can take the place of that; not occasions of Christian conference, larger or more private; not the intercourse of a chosen circle of pious friends; not the holy public rites and worship of the Church of God. Sooner or later, the necessity of the personal, the individual, study of the sacred Word, and of the solitary use of the Throne of grace, will assert itself, if it is slighted, in the spiritual losses of the Christian who slights it.

* I hardly need say that this incident is not quoted to sadden or burthen one watchful, reverent believer, conscious in any true degree of the claims of the divine Majesty. Let such remember that the Holy One is “very pitiful and of tender mercy,” and let them read Isai. lvii. 15, 16. Very different cases are in view here.