Evening and Morning
By Charles
Haddon Spurgeon
June 25
Morning
"Get thee up into the high
mountain."—Isaiah 40:9.
Our knowledge of Christ is
somewhat like climbing one of our Welsh mountains. When you are at the base you
see but little: the mountain itself appears to be but one-half as high as it
really is. Confined in a little valley, you discover scarcely anything but the
rippling brooks as they descend into the stream at the foot of the mountain.
Climb the first rising knoll, and the valley lengthens and widens beneath your
feet. Go higher, and you see the country for four or five miles round, and you
are delighted with the widening prospect. Mount still, and the scene enlarges; till at last, when you are on the summit, and look east,
west, north, and south, you see almost all England lying before you. Yonder is
a forest in some distant county, perhaps two hundred miles away, and here the
sea, and there a shining river and the smoking
chimneys of a manufacturing town, or the masts of the ships in a busy port. All
these things please and delight you, and you say, "I could not have
imagined that so much could be seen at this elevation." Now, the Christian
life is of the same order. When we first believe in Christ we see but little of
Him. The higher we climb the more we discover of His beauties. But who has ever
gained the summit? Who has known all the heights and depths of the love of Christ which passes knowledge? Paul, when grown old, sitting
grey-haired, shivering in a dungeon in Rome, could say with greater emphasis
than we can, "I know whom I have believed," for each experience had
been like the climbing of a hill, each trial had been like ascending another
summit, and his death seemed like gaining the top of the mountain, from which
he could see the whole of the faithfulness and the love of Him to whom he had
committed his soul. Get thee up, dear friend, into the high mountain.
Evening
"The dove found no rest for the sole of her
foot."—Genesis 8:9.
Reader, can you find rest
apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then be assured that your religion is vain.
Are you satisfied with anything short of a conscious knowledge of your union
and interest in Christ? Then woe unto you. If you
profess to be a Christian, yet find full satisfaction in worldly pleasures and
pursuits, your profession is false. If your soul can stretch herself at rest,
and find the bed long enough, and the coverlet broad enough to cover her in the
chambers of sin, then you are a hypocrite, and far enough from any right
thoughts of Christ or perception of His preciousness. But if, on the other
hand, you feel that if you could indulge in sin without punishment, yet it
would be a punishment of itself; and that if you could have the whole world,
and abide in it for ever, it would be quite enough misery not to be parted from
it; for your God—your God—is what your soul craves after; then be
of good courage, thou art a child of God. With all thy sins and imperfections,
take this to thy comfort: if thy soul has no rest in sin, thou are not as the
sinner is! If thou art still crying after and craving after something better,
Christ has not forgotten thee, for thou hast not quite forgotten Him. The
believer cannot do without his Lord; words are inadequate to express his
thoughts of Him. We cannot live on the sands of the wilderness, we want the
manna which drops from on high; our skin bottles of creature confidence cannot
yield us a drop of moisture, but we drink of the rock which follows us, and
that rock is Christ. When you feed on Him your soul can sing, "He hath
satisfied my mouth with good things, so that my youth is renewed like the
eagle's," but if you have Him not, your bursting wine vat and well-filled
barn can give you no sort of satisfaction: rather lament over them in the words
of wisdom, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"