| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 1 |
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These are simple illustrations of the law which applies also in human life. We must die to be useful–to be truly a blessing. Our Lord put this truth in a little parable, when he said that the seed must fall into the earth and die that it may bear fruit. Christ’s own cross is the highest illustration of this. His friends said he wasted his precious life; but was that life wasted when Jesus was crucified? George MacDonald in one of his little poems, with deep spiritual insight, presents this truth of the blessed gain of Christ’s life through his sacrifice and death:–
“For three and thirty years, a living seed,
A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world’s side,
Thy death and rising, thou didst calmly bide;
Sore compassed by many a clinging weed
Spring form the fallow of soil of evil and need;
Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied;
Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride;
Until at length was done the awful deed,
And thou didst lie outworn in stony bower–
Three days asleep–oh, slumber godlike, brief,
For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief,
Heaven’s see, Thou diedst, that out of thee might tower
Aloft, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf
Of all Humanity the crimson flower.”
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