| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 9 |
Page 4 |
We each have in our soul, if we are true believes in Christ, a vision of spiritual loveliness into which we are striving to fashion our lives. This vision is our conception of the character of Christ. “That is what I am going to be some day,” we say. Far away beyond our present attainment as this vision may shine, yet we are ever striving to reach it. This is the ideal which we carry in our heart amid all our toiling and struggling. This ideal we must keep free from all marring or stain. We must save it, though, like the old sculptor, we lose our very life in guarding it. We should be willing to die rather than give it up to be destroyed. We should preserve the image of Christ, bright, radiant, unsoiled, in our soul, until it transforms our dull, sinful, earthly life into its own transfigured beauty.
No other aim in life is worthy of an immortal being. We may become like the angels; what debasement, the, to let our lives, with all their glorious possibilities, be dragged down into the dust of shame and dishonour! Rather let us seek continually the glory for which we were made and redeemed. “Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is. And everyone that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
“Wonderful the whiteness of thy glory;
Can we truly that perfection share?
Yes; our lives are pages of thy story,
We thy shape and superscription bear;
Tarnished forms–torn leaves–but thou canst mend them,
Thou thine own completeness canst unfold
From our imperfections, and wilt end them–
Dross consuming, turning dust to gold.”
A drop of water lay one day in a gutter, soiled, stained, and polluted. Looking up into the blue of the sky, it began to wish for purity, to long to be cleansed and made crystalline. Its sigh was heard, and it was quickly lifted up by the sun’s gentle fingers – up, out of the foul gutter, into the sweet air, then higher and higher; at length the gentle winds caught it and bore it away, away, and by and by it rested on a distant mountain top, a flake of pure, white, beautiful snow.
This is a little parable of what the grace of God does for every sinful life that longs and cries for purity and holiness.
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