Proverbs 4:18 But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shines more and more to the perfect day. No nobler expression has ever been given of the great thought of Christian progress than these words contain. But it is not always observed that that thought is presented twice in the text, once in the familiar condensed metaphor of life as a path, and once in the lovely expanded figure which follows. A path leads some whither; and the travellers on it are marching in a definite direction. Then, if we turn to the other emblem of our text, the idea is even more completely carried out in the original than our translation would suggest to an ordinary reader. For the words rendered "shining light" do really mean "light of dawn," and those rendered "perfect day" do really mean, literally though clumsily translated, "the steadfast (moment) of the day," the instant when the sun seems to pause on the meridian, like the tongue of the balance right in the centre, and inclining to neither side. I. SO LET ME ASK YOU TO LOOK, FIRST, AT THE GREAT POSSIBILITY OPENED HERE FOR US ALL. Now, it is true that every life, of whatever kind, tends to completeness in its own kind; that the good becomes better, and the bad worse. Single actions consolidate into habits, just as the minute grains of sand, beneath the pressure of the ocean, are hardened into rock. Convictions acted on are strengthened. Light stands as the emblem of three things — knowledge, purity, and joy. The Christian life is capable of continual increase in all three. 1. It is capable of continual increase in knowledge. Of course, I do not mean merely the intellectual apprehension of certain propositions which are received as true. We know a book or a science or a thought in one way; we know a person in another; and Christian knowledge is the knowledge of God in Christ, and of Christ in God. That knowledge is something a great deal more warm-blooded and full-pulsed than an intellectual perception of the truth of a statement. And it is this knowledge which it is intended should grow unceasingly in Christian experience, and in our daily life. We have an infinite object on whom to fix our minds and hearts. A man begins to be a Christian when perhaps through many a cloud, and with many hesitations and doubts, and with a very inadequate apprehension of the truth that he is receiving and the Person that he is grasping, his faith puts out an empty hand, and lays hold of Christ as his hope and his all. But as his days go on, if he be truly in possession of that initial truth, he will find that it opens out into splendours, and discloses depths and assumes a power controlling all life and thought, which he never dreamt of when he first apprehended it. We begin, like gold-seekers, with surface-washings; we end with crushing quartz. We begin on the edge of the great continent, we travel onwards and inwards, through all the leagues of its mountains and plains and lakes, and we never shall traverse it altogether. Life interprets Christ, if we let Christ interpret life. When the night of sorrow closes in over our heads, there are truths that shine out bright and starry, like the light points in a keen, frosty winter's night, which never could be seen in the garish day. 2. Again, the Christian life is capable of a perpetual increase in purity. And if a man be truly a Christian, there is nothing more certain than that, day by day, his conscience will become more sensitive and quick to discriminate between good and evil. The more we rise in the moral scale, the more solemn, sovereign, and far reaching we discern the commandment to be, that we shall be like our Lord. Depend upon it, all of us have things in our characters, and acts in our daily ordering of our lives, which, if we had advanced further along the path, we should avoid as a pestilence. 3. Again, the Christian life is capable of a continual increase in gladness. Yes! "As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." All other kinds of gladness fade, and all other sources pass away. But Jesus Christ's gladness, as He said Himself, is given to us that our "joy may be full," because His joy remains in us. Time takes the gloss off most things. It does not take the brightness out of the Christian life. II. LET US MARK THE FREQUENT FAILURE TO REALISE THIS POSSIBILITY. What I have been saying must sound to many of us liker irony than a description of fact, when we turn our eyes from the possibility for which provision is made by the gift of an infinite Christ, and an infinite Spirit, to the facts of Christian experience as we see them lying round us. Progress! Stagnation is the truth about hosts of us. A path! Well, it is a circular path if it is a path at all. They mark time, as the soldiers say, one foot up and the other down, but the feet are always planted in the same place. Sure I am that in a tragically large number of cases a professing Christian's early days are his best. Many of us seem to have gone to school to the Japanese gardeners, that will take you an oak, and stick it into a flower-pot, and stunt it there, so that it is warranted never to break the flower-pot, and never to grow an inch. There is another kind of opposite to that steady incease in brightness only too common amongst us, and that is — spasmodic growth by fits and starts; brief summer followed by a dreary winter, and no continuous and steadfast advance. III. LASTLY, LET ME ASK YOU TO CONSIDER THE CURE OF THE FAILURE, AND THE WAY OF REALISING THE POSSIBILITY. What made a man who is a Christian in reality light at first? The apostle tells us, "Now are ye light in the Lord." The reason why so many Christian people do not grow is because there is no depth and reality of union between them and Jesus Christ; and there is no depth or reality of union between them and Jesus Christ because they have no strength of faith. It is not merely for getting escape from some hell, or forgiveness for sins, that the faith is essential, but it is needful that there may be flowing into our hearts that which will change our darkness into radiance of light. Take a lesson from your electric lights. The instant that you break the contact, that instant the flame disappears. The first requisite, then, is to kep our union with Christ, and that is done by thinking about Him by the occupation of mind and heart with Him. And the second requisite is, to bring all our life under the influence of Christ's truth, and to bring all Christ's truth to bear upon our life. And then, we shall be "as the sun shineth in his strength." (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. |
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