Linggo, Mayo 6, 2018

Hospice of the Pilgrim - The Great Rest-Word of Christ (John MacDuff, 1891) Part 1

Matthew 11:28

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” 

PREFACE
"The heart never rests until it finds rest in You."
"You only are rest."
"Let my heart, a great ocean swelling with
 billows, be calm in You."
"Fix there, then, your resting-place, O my soul!"
Sentences from Augustine.

Who, in their memories of Switzerland and Italy, can fail to recall the HOSPICES for storm-beaten travelers which stud the higher and more perilous passes? One specially dwells in recollection, possibly because it was the first seen--the familiar hospice in the Pennine Alps; bringing still before us, though half a century has elapsed, the experience of pitiless sleet and darkness outside; and of log-fires, shelter, and genial fellowship inside. Others of more primitive form are constructed of pine or blocks of rough-hewn granite; at times with a motto or word of welcome surmounting their porches.
Such are surely typical, with a singular significance, of gospel realities--GOSPEL HOSPICES; and peculiarly of One whose motto of golden lettering occupies the prominent place in the pages which follow. It is the monograph of inspired monographs--words which, amid the priceless sayings of Jesus, "the Church throughout all the world" most lovingly clings to, and would be the last to part with--a strain of heavenly music which seems only endeared by repetition, as if the rehearsal brought out ever new and hitherto slumbering harmonies. The heart of humanity throbs responsive to this solitary solution for unrest.
How often has this verse, in many forms and phases, been recognized as an inspired teacher! Its rhythmic syllables have been enshrined in Art, and Music, and Sacred Song.
Into how many millions of aching hearts this saying of Jesus has found entrance, and brought with it the olive-branch of peace? It has formed for six thousand years the response to the cry of weary, care-worn humanity--a cry embracing every nation and every climate, from the yearnings of heathendom to the longings and aspirations of the present hour. From the tumultuous sea of the world's unrest the cry has gone up like a dirge of baffled souls– "Oh, where can rest be found?"
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
This verse has been cherished by fevered toilers in life's weary struggle. Yet in that stern, diversified battle--it may be with the humbling memories, the unrest and agony of conscious sin--in the season of pain and suffering and bereavement, in the loneliness of the supreme hour of all--how often has that word turned the storm into a calm! the weary and heavy-laden, the tearful and the fearful, sobbing themselves to rest in the peace of Christ!
The traveler groping in tempest, with every star apparently swept from the sky, yet looking wistfully amid the blinding hail and drifting snows for some HOSPICE of shelter, is at last able to record his experience--"I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me--refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto You, O Lord--I said, You are my Refuge [Hospice] and my Portion in the land of the living" (Psalm 142:4-5).
As will be seen, the invitation, recorded alone by the first evangelist, is taken as the golden prop which supports many of those other restful words ("rest-texts''), which we owe to the lips of Him who spoke as never man spoke--"The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." The Rock of Ages is one, but its clefts are many; each with its own silent answer to the quest, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest" (Ps. 55:6). The Sun of heaven is one, but encircled with many attendant stars and satellites. The Gospel Hospice, with its conspicuous motto of 'welcome', is one, but its chambers of repose and refuge are many. In accordance with the true plural rendering of the Hebrew in one of the most precious portions of the Psalter, we can say, as we enter the gracious Hospice for all pilgrims, "Return unto your Rests, O my soul!"
"And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Phil. 4:7.)

PASSPORT AT THE GATE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Whoever shall do the will of My Father who is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother." Matthew 12:50
These seem appropriate opening words, addressed to us by the Great Rest-Giver, on entering the Pilgrim-Stronghold. Mother, sister, brother, are names suggestive of the most hallowed Hospices of earthly affection. Earthly love in its depth and constancy is identified with them. When other trusted friendships fail--when other trusted fellowships, like strong mooring cables, suddenly snap asunder, and we are left drifting aimlessly in unsympathetic isolation--the relationships of home and kindred are rendered more sacred and endearing than ever. The world, at times ungenerous, may do its worst; but nothing can diminish or impair the love of father, mother, sister, brother.
The earthly is a parable of the heavenly. Christ offers a divine homestead to all those that do, or--what is all He asks or expects from imperfect natures--who seek to do the will of His Father in heaven. He offers and promises that in Himself the reality of these varied relationships, individually and combined, shall meet. No, more than all--at times through misconception, at times from sadder causes, son may be estranged from parent, brother from brother, sister from sister. But there is a Friend that sticks closer than a brother, or than any human relative. "Come unto Me!"--He offers a sure and abiding Hospice to the orphaned and fatherless, a stormless haven to the tempest-tossed. There is no contingency in His words--"And you shall find rest unto your souls."
If one of the most comforting themes brought into greater prominence in recent times be the Fatherhood of God, so also is this its counterpart and complement--the Brotherhood of Christ. He is linked in communion with universal humanity--"God, yet my Brother; Brother, yet my God." Wondrous thought! that the ties most endearing on earth, the sanctities of the family and home, have their highest and truest expression in the love of the Brother of brothers, the Friend of friends. He knew, surely, the finer impulses of the soul which these varied earthly relationships suggest, who reserved His last benediction for His beloved human mother, and the brother-heart of His dearest apostle.
I may be enabled to appropriate these privileges and enduring fellowships by striving to fulfill the Savior's one stipulated condition--of having my own way and will coincident with the divine, my nature more and more brought into delighted consecration to the service of Him whom it is alike my duty and honor to obey. If there be a fervent desire to do it, that "will" can be done anywhere--everywhere. "In all places I will come unto you and bless you"--in life's public ways, or in life's sequestered by-paths; in its "loud stunning tide" and noisy crowds, or in its enforced silences; in the fever-heats of mart and exchange, or in quiet retirement of the study, or in seclusion of the sick chamber; in the glare of day, or in the hush of night. Nor does the doing of that Father's will involve or exact great efforts or conspicuous deeds. Little services, little self-denials, the conscientious discharge of little responsibilities are acceptable (shall we say, most acceptable?) in the eye of Him who looks not on the outer appearance, but who looks on the heart.
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
"The deeds that He would have me do
Are wrought by love and prayer;
A world of lowly charities
Awaits His servant's care.
I need not seek some high emprise,
Or lofty work for God,
While crowds of simple duties rise
Like daisies from the sod."
Drudging commonplace work, worthily performed, with the right motive and spirit, is transfigured into divine service. Many a common coin may thus be stamped with the image and superscription of heaven. Many a voice feeble with pain and sorrow, may be made to resound with divine music.
One other thought our verse of today suggests. The purest and closest of human relationships--the affection subsisting between mother, sister, brother, taken here by Christ Himself, in the aggregate, as types of "a greater love"--are in themselves, and at the best, precarious, finite, perishable. Death may have defrauded, or at any moment may defraud, the earthly pictures of their charm, leaving only blank memories behind. But the "doers of God's will"--"pilgrims of the night"--in their impregnable, unassailable Hospice, are authorized to make the challenge, embracing this world and the next--"Who shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord?" In Him the earthly and heavenly affections, with their golden links welded together, will be strengthened, perpetuated, intensified in the unblighted Home and Hospice above--the life immortal.
Meanwhile let me live under the sovereignty of the lofty motive power, the purest and grandest of all spiritual forces, to walk and act so as to please God; inspired with the ambition, not of "serving Him much," but of "pleasing Him perfectly;" following the example of One whose motto was--and never more so than when the shadows of a deeper than this world's darkness were gathering around Him--"Not My will, but may Yours be done!"
O Christ! help me to some feeble reflection of this Your divine consecration; that, accepting the accompanying promise You do here make, I may serve myself heir to these peerless relationships. Knowing by increasing experience that Your service is self-rewarding and self-satisfying, may I be able to say, in Your own prophetic word– "I delight to do Your will, O my God--yes, Your law is within my heart."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

THE PILGRIM VISION
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Blessed are the pure in heart--for they shall see God." Matt. 5:8
To see God! What a Hospice! every window ablaze with Deity!
The Psalmist's ardent aspiration, as he anticipated through the troubled dream of life the morning of immortality, was this--"I shall be satisfied, when I awake with Your likeness" (Ps. 17:15). "Yet in my flesh," said a yet older pilgrim, weary and heavy laden, "shall I see God" (Job 19:26).
But the promise has not a future and heavenly anticipation only. That realizing sight and sense of the invisible, is a present beatitude bestowed on the "pure in heart." To them the unveiling of the divine glory is a special prerogative. It is this transparency of soul which imparts the capacity for "seeing God." We cannot see the splendor of the material sun through the pane of glass blurred with dust and cobwebs. The Divine Being can alone be discerned through the translucent windows of the holy renewed nature. "I shall behold Your face in righteousness." It was the prophet-spectator whose lips were touched with the live altar-coal who could say, "I have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!"
"Come to Me," says Jesus, as He invites to this Hospice, "and I will give you rest." There is a wonderful rest in the conscience void of offence both toward God and toward man. The soul that is the haunt of passion or impurity, seeking rest, can find none. To the owner of a throne, with gilded halls, and lordly surroundings, and an illustrious pedigree--if there be degraded memories and a blemished life--happiness is impossible. We can understand Paul's noble protestation before King Agrippa. Rather "these bonds" with a pure conscience; than a crown on the brow, scarred with dishonor (Acts 26:29).
O Great Rest-Giver, impart this purity of soul, that holiness without which no man can see the Lord. Alas! it is too often nebulous vapors of our own creating--the noisy jars and turmoil of life, its feverish and fretting cares--which dim the Infinite Vision. "But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." The higher the spiritual Pilgrim ascends above mist and valley, the more is his moral sight cleared, and he insures the serenity of the soul at peace with God.
Try to build around you a fortress that will render as impossible, as may be a disloyal thought, a lapsed purpose, an unworthy aim, an aggrieved and corroded conscience. Let Purity and Love be the two ministering angels which keep the fire burning on the shrine of the heart-temple. Aspire after loyalty to truth and duty. Seek to be able to cherish the memory, not of defeat and failure, cowardliness and surrender--but the happier retrospect of vanquished temptation, struggle ending in victory, the conquests of goodness. Thus under a serene sky may the vision and blessing of the pilgrim patriarch be yours, who, as he paused on his journey, called his Hospice "Peniel"--"for," said he, "I have seen God face to face."
Or the similar realization by faith of a near and ever-present God--the shadow of the Almighty--which nerved Moses in the midst of his wilderness trials, and gave him grace to suffer and be strong. "He endured, as seeing Him who is invisible." It was in his case the ratification of the outset promise--"My Presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest."
While blessed are all those who enjoy this soul-sight, this luminous spiritual vision, it was enjoyed pre-eminently, O Christ, by You! Your heart was the home of unsullied purity. You were the true "Lily of the Valley," without speck or stain on its petals; and, being such, You did know, as none other could, the delight, and "rest," and reality of Your own beatitude. Creature-purity can at the best be a feeble approximation to that of You, the Sinless One; the dim luster of candle or glow-worm compared to the glory of the meridian sun; the finite as compared to the infinite. But seeking as a life-long, habitual aim, to be gradually conformed to Your image, with some good measure of lowly confidence may this be my avowal, combining an earthly and a heavenly meaning– "We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

THE DOOR OF ENTRANCE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"I am the door--by Me if any man enters in, he shall be saved." John 10:9
Where or what is the entrance-gate to these "peaceful habitations," these "quiet resting-places"? (Isa. 32:18)
To this question varied have been the answering voices echoed through the ages. Many--most of these are false, delusive, unsatisfactory--men, like the citizens of Sodom, "wearying themselves to find the door." Naaman's preference for his Syrian rivers--the streams murmuring amid the groves and gardens of Damascus, and his rejection of the waters of Israel--Jordan and the tributary brooks that fitfully fed it--is a just reflection and picture of the many gropings after the false rest, and the many evasions of the true rest. Some strive to enter through the gateway of ethical system and philosophic code and tenet. Others, through the gateway of human merit. Others through ceremonial observances--fasts and vigils, penances and pilgrimages, rites and ceremonies, creeds and dogmas, party badges and contrived shibboleths. These, and such as these, are alike spurious and unavailing.
Christ is the true and only true Door of entrance. "Look unto Me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth;" and "neither is there salvation in any other." There was but one way for the Israelites of old to avert the sword of the destroying angel. They might have resorted to measures of their own devising. Massive blocks of stone, immense as those of the familiar pyramids, might have been piled in front of their dwellings--walled up, for that part, to heaven. They would avail nothing as a substitute for the blood-sprinkled lintels and door-posts.
Again--in the lofty poetry of the prophet, Lebanon might have been transformed into a high altar, its forests of oak and cedar converted into fuel, and the cattle roaming their glades laid thereon as a burnt-offering (Isa. 40:16). All would have been inadequate and worthless. As there was but one door to the ark, one gate to the cities of refuge, so there is, to every seeker and climber, only one entrance to the spiritual Hospice, with its challenge and rebuke to whatever is false and artificial--"This gate of the Lord into which the righteous shall enter." "Come unto ME," says the Divine Rest-Giver; "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."
"To whom, O Savior, shall we go?
We gaze around in vain.
Though pleasure's fairy lute be strung,
And mirth's enchanting lay be sung,
We dare not trust the strain.
You have the words of endless life;
You give victory in the strife–
In life, in death, alike we flee,
O Savior of the world, to Thee."
And gracious to every pilgrim is the assurance, that through this solitary entrance all are warranted and all are welcome; no moat or iron gateway to prevent reaching direct the open portal. Thousands have entered in and been saved, and yet there is room.
Other hospices of the world are restricted to privileged classes--the favored few. Not so here. "If ANY man." The sun and the light of heaven are not more free than the offer of salvation. The King has flung wide the gates to the most fainting and toil-worn. No flaming sword of cherubim bars the way. No adversary can obscure or erase the motto and superscription on its portico--"Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shut it."
O God, I come, weary and heavy laden, to this sheltering Refuge. If, until now, I have been a stranger to safety and peace, let me hear Your voice, and let faith accept the offer--"Come in, you blessed of the Lord, why do you stand outside?" "Enter in and be saved." The invitation and the promise have lost none of their divine efficacy and gracious music since they were first uttered. There is no other call so reliable; there is no other security so strong. There is no such "finality" in any other of earth's utterances. Time writes its wrinkles all around. What seems most enduring is subject to flux, vacillation, disintegration, decay. The globe itself, as in long past epochs, so even now, is subjected to geological and climatic variations--inappreciably, but none the less surely, to strange alternations of heat and cold. The apparently most stable things are not stable. "The world goes spinning down the ringing grooves of change." The old "hearts of oak," Britain's pride, have given way to iron-sheathed leviathans with their sleeping thunders. The mechanical agencies and triumphs of modern discovery may possibly, before a few decades elapse, have to abdicate in favor of other kingly forces and motive powers, some new dynamics hidden in nature's laboratory.
"Our little systems have their day–
They have their day, and cease to be."
But while other gates of brass may be broken, other bars of iron wrenched asunder, there can be no change in the portals of the Gospel Hospice. He who is Himself the Entrance Gate, and who stands holding it in His hand, who opens and no man shuts, whose unwearied invitation is "Knock, and it shall be opened," is "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever."
"Open to me the gates of righteousness--I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord!"
Take me to the fold, is the inarticulate cry of the wanderer of the flock. Take me to the ark, is the inarticulate longing of the dove, as, conscious of its homelessness, with weary wing and wailing cry it roams the wilderness of waters. Take me to the Hospice-gate, is the yearning of the belated traveler battling with blinding hurricane of hail or snow. Take me home, take me to my father, is the plaintive monotone of the child that has lost its way in the noisy thoroughfare, unheeded by the passers-by.
Humanity has ever borne attestation to this soul restlessness--that the world at its best, with its glittering prizes, glowing visions, and winged ambitions, cannot satisfy. But HE can satisfy; He does satisfy. "And He said unto them, Did you lack anything? And they answered, nothing" (Luke 22:35). How many can joyfully appropriate the words of Bunyan in his great allegory, "When I came at the gate that is at the head of the way, the Lord of that place did entertain me freely, and gave me such things that were necessary for my journey, and bid me hope to the end!"
Many refuges may prove too often refuges of lies, counterfeits, figures of the true. But shielded, guarded, shepherded by Christ, safe in His keeping--safe within the wicket-gate of the Fold and the portals of the Pilgrim-Hospice, may I be able in reposeful confidence to say– "My flesh and my heart fails--but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

THE CHAMBER CALLED PEACE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives, give I unto you." John 14:27
No diviner or more soothing music than this--the great lullaby of lullabies.
What a Hospice the words must have been for those to whom they were first addressed! The pilgrim apostles, laboring and heavy laden, were about to be overtaken by whelming tempest. Thunder clouds they had little anticipated were at the moment gathering ominously around them. In that valley of the shadow of death they were entering there was no blue opening, no rift in the sky. Their best Friend, as they had been forewarned, was soon to be removed. The voice would soon no longer be heard which was used to say in seasons of depression and sadness, "Come apart into a desert place and rest awhile." They would be left alone to buffet the storm.
But, before the valley-gloom is encountered, the gracious Rest-Giver, in a divine, spiritual sense, utters the conventional greeting--so well known to all Orientals, and specially the Jews--Peace! "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you."
It was a true Hos-peace, "a House of Peace," whose gates He was opening to them. He who came to give peace on earth welcomes the weary ones in. The customary Jewish salutation conveyed little meaning. It had degenerated into mere formal parlance--no more. "Mine," says Christ, "My promised gift, is no mere verbal form of expression, but a reality."
And, though first spoken to the disciples, it was a farewell promise--a parting legacy for all--for you and for me. Death-bed sayings are always affecting and sacredly treasured. Here is a keepsake intended for the Church and for believers of every age; all the more precious because uttered within shadow of Gethsemane.
The walls of this Gospel Hospice are built of peace of Christ's own procuring--"peace through the blood of His cross." The pilgrim who reaches the threshold of "the chamber called peace, whose windows open to the sunrising," is safe, restful, secure, happy.
"All my favorite passages in the Holy Scriptures," says one of the greatest of our poets in the days of her simplest devotion (Mrs. Barrett Browning), "are those which promise and express peace--such as, 'The Lord of peace, Himself give you peace always and by all means;' 'My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives give I;' and, 'He gives His beloved sleep.' They strike upon the disturbed earth with such a foreignness of heavenly music." The last of these she makes the refrain in the most familiar of her verses–
"His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still–
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He gives His beloved sleep."
"O Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant me Your peace!" Your peace is "not as the world gives." The world's rest, the rest of creature comforts and external blessings, is fitful, uncertain, unstable--ours today, gone tomorrow. Often its greeting is, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace."
And yet, if it be not an apparent paradox, "not as the world gives" implies another, almost opposite characteristic; and the thought ought to be one of comfort to many. Let none, in the pursuit of peace, be downcast or discouraged by reason of harassment, mental and moral discords and disharmonies. These are often preludes to truest cadence. If I might venture to expand the thought and illustration of a gifted writer (Professor Elmslie, "Memoir and Sermons," page 291), the world's peace is often not worth the having, just because it takes the shape of an easy-going quiescence--no more. It is alike artificial and superficial. The peace of Christ, on the other hand, that which is best and noblest, frequently comes after conflict and out of conflict. It is a peace which has its travail and birth-pangs--a peace which at times has its pedigree in defeat, baffling enigma, mysterious discipline, bewildering doubt, barely vanquished temptation. Two of the small but beautiful lakes among the Allan hills, near Rome, so peaceful and serene, with myrtle and olive trees mirrored in the quiet waters, occupy the craters of extinct volcanoes. Their cradles of rest were rocked by unrest. First, struggle, upheaval--forces of terror and destruction, a seething caldron, then peace. First, wild convulsion and paroxysm; this followed by nature's loveliest pictures and features of repose--"quiet waters," the song of nightingales in the adjacent woods, trails of vine, a cascade of wild roses, a golden canopy of moss and lichen on the surrounding rocks.
"Not as the world gives," says the great Peace-Giver. "I have chosen you in the furnace [the crater] of affliction." "After you have suffered awhile, establish, strengthen, settle you." "These are those who have come out of Great Tribulation."
Yet, true as this often is, it is equally true that when once the boon of this unworldly peace is secured, how reliable and permanent it is! "The peace of God which passes all understanding, shall keep [as in a stronghold or Hospice] your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." "Keep;" it is the guarantee of security. The promised gift is alike present and future--a peace which the world cannot give, and which the world cannot take away; peace ringing its silver bells in unlikeliest places--in peasant hut and lonely garret, and amid hum of busiest industry, yes, too, even amid uncongenial and repelling environments; peace in joy, peace in sorrow; peace in the varied vicissitudes of life; peace, above all, in the solemn hour when the spirit is about to wing its arrowy flight to the Great Beyond. Peace floods the death-chamber with its own mellowed celestial radiance. The Hospice catches the earliest sunbeam, and is gilded with the last evening ray.
"These things have I spoken unto you, that in Me you might have peace."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12


THE HOSPICE OF TRUST
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"What I do you know not now; but you shall know hereafter." John 13:7
Most gracious Refuge, specially built on the Hill Difficulty, designed for Faint-hearts and Feeble-minds--weary ones, in their nights of toil and darkness. This saying of the Savior can be condensed in two words, "Trust Me."
There is much in life's pilgrimage and its complexities which must be left to faith, and much that is baffling to sight; much demanding the surrender of our own wills and the merging of them in a Higher. "All these things are against me," said the stricken patriarch. He lived to cancel and reverse this impeachment of the divine faithfulness, and to recognize the love and mindfulness which in an impatient moment he had disowned.
The great apostle of an after age descried the kindling fires of persecution. Too surely anticipating the battles of the faith, he could see little with the eye of sense save conflict and suffering. But faith takes him within the Gospel Hospice. Amid present insecurity, it whispers of nobler things in reversion. Faith puts into his lips this song in the night, "We know that all things work together for good." He trusted his Lord's "hereafter" promise, and he lived to make this entry in the diary of his own personal experience, "The things which have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel."
It is for us to honor God by implicit reliance on His word.
"You may not see that all is good–
The bow is broken in its strength;
But what is now misunderstood
Will have its 'wherefore' solved at length."
"Providence," says Flavel, "is like a curious piece of tapestry, made up of a thousand shreds, which, single, we know not what to make of, but put together and stitched up orderly, they represent to the eye a beautiful history."
"His plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold.
We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart;
Time will reveal the calyxes of gold."
When the pillar-cloud, as with Israel of old, conducts, not by the short and easy way to Canaan, but by the circuitous route and through the depths of the sea, it is for us to offer no remonstrance, but, with unmurmuring submission and unreasoning faith, to hear the directing Voice, the "marching orders"--"Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward." The Savior's promise will be abundantly ratified "beyond the flood." But even in this world it is partially fulfilled.
Not a few can endorse the Psalmist's averment, "They went through the flood on foot; there [in the very pathway of trial] did we rejoice in HIM." And if not at the time of chastening and affliction, "yet nevertheless afterward" the need-be is often unfolded, the peaceable fruits of righteousness are yielded and made manifest. But for the diverse sorrows of David, and of the subsequent Babylon minstrels, the best and most affecting portions of the Psalter would have been lost to us.
The eyes of the pilgrim disciples on the way to Emmaus were "closed, so that they knew Him not." Their hopes had suddenly undergone a great eclipse. The "Sun of their soul'' had set in darkness. Tears of blissful communion were a memory--no more. They gazed on the cloud, but there was no trace of the rainbow. They could but echo the dirge wailed by others, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." But in due time He revealed Himself--"Their eyes were opened, and they knew Him." Hastening to the upper room in Jerusalem, they joined in the briefest but gladdest of songs which thrilled on the lips of those there assembled, "The Lord is risen indeed!" (Luke 24:34.) The Divine dealing is often not at once but gradually explained. The clouds of mid-day and afternoon slowly but surely take on their crimson and silver linings in the western sky.
"You noble few, who here unbending stand
Beneath life's pressure! yet bear up awhile,
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deemed evil, is no more;
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded spring encircle all."
"And it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"He that has seen Me has seen the Father." John 14:9
What is God? That is the great, the primal and final problem of humanity. It formed the unsolved enigma of the ages until Christ came. It cannot be frittered away by any modern Pantheistic theories in which the existence of a personal Deity is discarded and denied. No one can venture to say he has found rest until he attains some definite knowledge of the character of the Being with whom he has to do. Moses was only the unconscious interpreter of the world's anxious, yearning souls when he made the request, "I beseech You, show me Your glory." The answer has been given. A Hospice, precious above others, has the Rest-Giver provided for the weary traveler--"No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18).
In another sense, indeed, we have seen and are daily seeing the world's Creator and Benefactor. Outer nature is no silent oracle. "The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." They are the most familiar of platitudes when we speak of the Almighty as imaged and manifested in sea and earth and air and sky, in mountain and grove and valley; His praise intoned in song of bird, and music of stream, and deep bass of ocean; above all, in the music of the spheres--the stellar glories of the skies--day and night joining in the antiphonal strain.
But there are at times, also, stern and conflicting, dissonant and discordant voices, anomalies ever and again occurring, alike in the material and moral economy--the scathing lightning, the havoc-making earthquake, the devouring famine, the death-shrieks of the perishing, the sea's "wandering graves;" not to enlarge on many other forms under which we group what are called "startling providences," perhaps, specially, the baffling mysteries of suffering and pain. Our only explanation often is, "Verily, you are a God that hides Yourself;" "Your judgments are a great deep!"
Yes, God, this great God, to many a soul would Himself be the mystery of mysteries, His name "secret" (wonderful), but for the gracious announcement and declaration of the Incarnate Savior, "He that has seen Me, has seen the Father." The person and character of Christ have been well compared to a viaduct spanning the otherwise dreadful chasm separating us from the Unknowable and Incomprehensible of the agnostic, and rendering the God with whom we have to do alike knowable and known. "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest," for I am the Image, the Reflection, the Revelation of the Invisible; the true Antitype of the pillar of enfolding cloud which screened from the Israelites of old the Presence of Deity; God in Christ, and Christ in God! As "words" are the audible expression of silent thought, so is He "THE WORD" (the Word which was made flesh), the spoken revelation of the Supreme--"Who has spoken unto us by His Son" (Heb. 1:2).
Then follows the complementary query, "What is Christ?" Ponder the details of His life and ministry as these are evolved in the four Gospels. He is, above all else, "the Forgiver." While holiness and purity and hatred of moral evil constituted the essentials of His ethical teachings, while uncompromisingly denouncing sin in its every hydra-shape, and stripping it of its sophistries--who can trace these three crisis-years in earth's history without being impressed by the conviction that Love, in its varied phases, formed the noblest expression of His character, and like a divine aroma perfumed His every word and deed?
As we follow His footsteps on the shores of the Syrian lake, or in the temple-courts of Judea, or by the footpaths and groves of Olivet, or as He comes from His oratory beneath the silent stars, what do we behold? A Divine Pardoner; a gracious Being who impressed all with whom He came in contact with the spell of His goodness--succouring the needy, rescuing the perishing; imparting comfort and solace to the sorrowing, the troubled, the bereaved--confirming hesitating wills; pardoning faithless desertion; offering hope to the penitent; help to the disgraced, welcome to the prodigal, salvation to the lost. Such, says He, is GOD--"My Father and your Father; My God, your God." And as this Father-God "sent" His Son to earth for the redemption of mankind, let all His sufferings, from Bethlehem's manger to Calvary's cross, and specially the latter, their crown and consummation, be the measure and exponent of the Father's love--"God so loved the world."
Blessed Savior, in You, as the Revealer of the Almighty, I can lay my heaviest burden down. I can look up to the mightiest of all beings, and say, "From henceforth I know Him, and have seen Him." I can address Him by the endearing name You were specially called to unfold. Secure in this Gospel Hospice, I can read on its lintels the gracious lettering– "I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12
THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"I am the resurrection, and the life--he that believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." John 11:25
"If a man dies, shall he live again?" has been the perplexed and perplexing question, the anxious, unsolved problem of the ages. When these eyes close in their mortal sleep, when dust has returned to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth, shall there be, can there be, a requickening from decay to vitality? or is all to end in annihilation--dreamless oblivion? There is much to dim and darken. The very analogies of nature, beautiful as they are and so often quoted, are in themselves partial, unsatisfactory. Under the blaze of rigid, exacting truth, they are defective and misleading. The corn-grain, apparently without a spark of animation, as inert as the clods under which it is laid, is not dead but living. "Our Lord," says Luther, "has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring time." Yes; but these leaves come from no dead branch, or sapless trunk, or decayed root, but are nurtured by living though unseen forces within the apparent skeleton tree. The chrysalis, with the seeming torpor of death, has within it, also, the embryo, the same slumbering forces of life; its lustrous wings are not born of the worm and corruption. Not so that pulseless, rayless, inanimate mortal human body, the speedy prey of dissolution. There is resurrection, rejuvenescence for the flowers of spring which rim the loved one's grave; but all else below seems to refute the fond dream of an afterlife, when, year after year, decade after decade, nothing save "everlasting silence reigns."
"But come with Me," says Christ, "and I will ease you of this burden also. I will reveal to you the secret hidden from ages and generations. I can take, as no other can, the bereft to the tombs of their loved ones, and whisper My own requiem and lullaby--In Christ, in peace. Rest with Me." You who are bearing this heaviest and most crushing of life-sorrows, be comforted! You can write on every churchyard gate, you can carve on every stone in these realms of silence, "My flesh also shall rest in hope."
Laying aside the natural arguments for the immortality of the soul (perhaps one of the strongest of which is the instinctive feeling within each of us of a hereafter), all uncertainty is swept away by the great word, and, subsequently, by the great deed, of our Divine Redeemer. He proclaims Himself here, when standing amid the memorials of death, as "the Resurrection, and the Life." He proved and substantiated the assertion--first, in a subsidiary way, by the revivifying of His deceased friend; and, afterwards, far more by His own gigantic triumph over Death and Hades, when He came forth from the sepulcher a moral Conqueror. By that rising He has converted the graves of His people into "cemeteries" (sleeping places), "hospices" (houses of peace). The everlasting hills, to every pilgrim, are gilded with the light of unsetting suns. Our "loved and lost" are only lost to be loved again–
"Though down the long, dim avenues of the past
Their swift feet fled,
In His eternity the rooms are vast–
There wait they to be ours at last–
They are not dead!"
Glorious assurance! In Him, my once dying but now ever-living Lord and Head, Death is vanquished and the Grave spoiled. The last enemy only ushers into a blessed continuity of life. Christ, having overcome the sharpness of death, has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
A writer narrates that Marcia, a Roman matron, was inconsolable, mourning the irreparable loss of a son of great promise. Seneca, one of the sagest of pagan philosophers, whose counsel she sought, advised her to forget her grief "as the lower creation do." His panacea was 'oblivion'. "Go, bury your sorrow." "Let the dead bury their dead." Hear Him, who has opened a Hospice at the very mouth of the dark valley, speaking by the lips of His apostle--"But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him" (1 Thess. 4:13, 14).
No wonder the first Christians, on the walls of their catacombs, loved to portray the fabled Phoenix, the bird of Immortality, perched on the true Heavenly Palm; and that their loved greeting was not, "The Lord has died," but, "The Lord has risen."
"Hallelujah! dry the tear,
'Jesus Christ is risen!'
Sound o'er every silent coffin–
'Jesus Christ is risen!'
Thrice blessed pledge, you mourners, keep,
Who for your loved departed weep,
Because He lives, they only sleep,
Hallelujah!"
May it be your earnest desire now, as risen with Christ, to seek those things that are above, where He sits at the right hand of God, that– "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

REST IN SERVICE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"If any man serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am there shall also My servant be--if any man serves Me, him will My Father honor." John 12:26
The service of Christ in its very activities is Rest. It is the answer to the weary cry and quest of humanity, "Who will show us any good? Lord, lift up the light of Your countenance upon us." "Come unto me," is the address of many siren voices, titillating tones of questionable or forbidden pleasure, leading only to unrest, disquiet, heart-weariness, life-failure--tinted soap bubbles with a momentary iridescence, then collapsing.
"Come unto Me," is the invitation addressed by Jesus; and in that are included many voices of healthful happiness and joy which God Himself approves. But even pleasures, in themselves lawful, fail to insure perfect satisfaction and peace. If they are legitimate and commendable, it is only as means to an end. They are resting-places, but not substitutes for the only true Rest and Hospice in God and His Christ. "You will keep him in perfect peace [literally, peace, peace], whose mind is stayed on You" (Isa. 26:3).
Blessed Savior, Your service alone is perfect freedom! The green pastures and the still waters are only to be found "by the Shepherd's tent." They who have gone the round of all the world's fascinations, are often the first to write on the retrospect, "Not enough." Theirs is the wooden Alpine chalet, for summer joys and summer skies; not the Hospice, with rock foundations and granite walls, the shelter for all seasons--"In summer and winter it shall be." They who have sought the Redeemer with loving purpose, tested Him, proved Him, are able to make the avowal of the Queen of Sheba regarding the true Solomon, "The half was not told me."
Let the philosophic skeptic produce, out of his cold negations, a new Christ better than the Christ of history; a diviner Force, to mold and regenerate humanity, than the Christ of Nazareth; some other and better than He to walk with untiring feet along every path of sorrow, every Via Dolorosa; who, better than He, could impart strength to the palsied arm, courage to the fearful, hope to the hopeless; drying weeping eyes, stilling the throbbings of aching hearts, taking anguish out of loneliness, strewing the wilderness and solitary places with lovelier flowers than those of Eden, opening Hospices all along the pilgrim way up to the very gates of glory--then, but not until then, will we listen to the rejection of "the truth as it is in Jesus."
O Jesus, Son of the Most High God, may it be my habitual desire, in accordance with the words of our meditation, and as evidence of heart-consecration to Your service, to "follow You;" to set You ever before me as my Ideal of all excellence, and to be gradually, however imperfectly, transfigured into Your divine likeness! Let the prayer and resolve of one who knew, more than most, the bliss and security of the Pilgrim-Hospice, be mine--"Let me set forth anew, O Lord, as a pilgrim on the earth, with my rod and staff; and so set my heart on You, that in all places You may be my dwelling-place and home--I in You and You in me" (Memorials of a Quiet Life). May I submissively accept even burdens, if it be Your will that I should carry them, feeling and saying in the spirit of Galileo when he had become blind, "Whatever is pleasing to God is pleasing to me." Then will all trials be made light and all crosses easy.
"There are briers besetting every path,
That call for patient care;
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer;
But a lowly heart that leans on You
Is happy everywhere."
Let the wondrous thought included in the Savior's utterance of today prove a further quickener and inspiration--that in thus serving Him, following Him, loving Him, the Father, too, is honored and glorified. Let others be content with seeking rest and peace in the chase of trooping shadows, which perish with the using; be it mine, with rest in possession and glory in prospect, to say– "As for me, I will behold Your face in righteousness--I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Your likeness."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

HOSPICE WATCHERS
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Occupy until I come." Luke 19:13
"Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he comes shall find watching." Luke 12:37
These two verses describe the character and the position of Christ's faithful servants, who, when the sign of the Son of man shall be seen in the heavens and the cry heard, "He comes, He comes to judge the earth," will be found safe in the Gospel Hospice, "occupying" and "watching;" ready with the exulting challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"
It is a double message, meanwhile, from the Rest-Giver to those pilgrims who have borne, and are still bearing their burdens; who have accepted life as an appointed scene of discipline--every trial appointed; and who are looking forward with calm expectancy to that day which will reveal and explain all mysteries and solve all doubts; not over-solicitous to have the burden weighing on them removed or the cross uplifted, if it be His will to retain it. "Occupy until I come." "Occupy!" Work. Be busy. Recognize the present as the time, not for reverie, but as the season and realm of duty. It is the voice of Jesus, reminding of privilege and responsibility. "Occupy!" Be not like the lone marsh, the inky pool, with no outflow for its waters, with the miasma brooding over it, and whose margin the very birds seem to avoid. Rather be like the flowing stream "bounding over rock and wild cascade," "occupying" its living, life-giving mission to fertilize and bless.
"Found watching." This is the complementary call. As the first is all exhortation to active, unremitting energy--working out salvation with fear and trembling; the latter is the inculcation of the passive virtues--waiting and watching, patience and trust. The one is the exhortation for the girded loins--zeal and activity; the other for the burning lamps--readiness for the opened door and the Bridegroom's summons, keeping vigil for the present, if need be, in the gloom under the olive-trees of sorrow--"Tarry here and watch with Me;" trusting the faithfulness of Him who there bore heavier and more mysterious burdens. Seen in the light of that great day of God, these burdens will lose their heaviness; they will be burdens no more.
Prepare me specially, gracious Savior, for that blessed hope, even Your own glorious appearing. "Until I come." It is a luminous rainbow, bright with the prismatic colors of gospel promise, spanning the evening of life and the Church's future. Let me often love to repair to the battlements of this Hospice and gaze at it through rain and cloud. "At evening-time it shall be light." When the advent-hour shall strike, it will be the world's true curfew-bell, announcing that the fires are to be put out--the fires of sin, the fires of tribulation; and that the peace, so fitful, troubled, intermittent here, will be merged into that of eternity. The motto-saying of our Volume will have thus a new and everlasting significance– "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest FOREVER."
"I am come," says a gifted writer, as the night-shadows were passing into daybreak--"I am come to that stage of my pilgrimage that is within sight of the River of Death; and I feel that now I must have all in readiness, day and night, for the messenger of the King."
Happy those who thus, with trimmed lamps and replenished vessels, will be able, as they join the festal train on the great bridal day of the Church triumphant, to say– "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

BEYOND THE VALLEY
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." Luke 12:32
It is the Shepherd's voice. Under that favorite and expressive emblem He is set before His Church as Himself the Burden-Bearer. The wandering sheep is on His shoulders, and He carries it back to the fold and to its rest rejoicing. The verse seems in this place to be put in contrast with the cares and solicitudes against which He had warned His people in the immediately preceding context. As a substitute for earthly-mindedness, they are called (to use the suggestive word of a German commentator) to "heavenly-mindedness,"--lifted above the fretting and depressive anxieties of a present evil world, to that kingdom of the Father which is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches are hostile to rest. With all the rare endowments of nature and "wealth of circumstance," few knew better than Dante what it was to be "weary and heavy laden;" how little outward things, and least of all worldly aggrandizement, could minister to the mind diseased, and meet the heart-longing for repose. In his great poem he puts these words into the lips of another–
"For all the gold that is beneath the moon,
Or ever has been, of those weary souls
Could never make a single one repose."
"The world passes away, and the lust thereof--but he that does the will of God abides forever."
Note two of the characteristics of those whom the Great Rest-Giver addresses.
It is a LITTLE flock--despised by the world, unthought of by men; in many ways unworthy of the Shepherd's cognizance and regard. Each "little," each finite life is like the mathematical point, having position but no magnitude. The finite compared to the Infinite! It is like a tiny drop in the shoreless sea! But God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. "Fear not, worm Jacob." What may be scorned and unpitied of men, enlists the tenderness, sympathy, and love of the Shepherd of the sheep. "It is not," says He, "the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish" (Matt. 18:14). It is His own beautiful prophetic saying--"I will turn my hand upon the little ones" (Zech. 13:7).
It is a TREMBLING flock. The existence of fear and misgiving is acknowledged; the apprehension, it may be, at times of the forfeiture of promised spiritual blessing; the encountering of peril and difficulty and danger. "The wolf comes and scatters the sheep." But ultimate safety is not the less insured, though possibly reached with torn fleece and bleeding feet. The Speaker interposes the quieting assurance, "Fear not." He gives His pledge to fetch every wanderer home. The covenanted kingdom is safe, for it is "the Father's good pleasure" to bestow it. A Father-God and a Shepherd-Savior have put their names to that kingdom's title-deeds. We have there a double guarantee, that nothing can defraud us of our covenant rights, nothing cross us out of our purchased inheritance. Occasionally there may be and will be tempests to buffet and floods to pass through. But He who purchased the flock and tended it, followed it in all its devious wanderings in "the dark and cloudy day," will at last fold it secure in the pastures of the blessed. In the words of an old divine, "He leads us in; He leads us through; He leads us on; He leads us up; He leads us home."
O gracious Savior, Your strong arm will bear me safely. Let me be responsive to Your call and obedient to Your guidance and direction.
I will listen to Your "Come unto Me," and to the sure word of promise, embracing this world and the next– "Fear not--for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are mine."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12

Isaiah 28:12

“To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.” 

https://www.gracegems.org/

Walang komento:

Mag-post ng isang Komento