| Finding the Way |
Chapter 17 |
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Devotion is not all of a holy life. It would be very sweet to stay on holy mountains with Christ and not return again to the world of toil and struggle, but that is not the purpose of our redemption. We are to pray and commune with our Master. We are to sit down at His table and enjoy the rapture of His love and the joy of His presence. But we are not to build tabernacles and stay there. We are to go quickly from the closet of devotion, out into the wide field, where a sinning, suffering, sorrowing world needs us that we may carry to men the blessings which we have received.
Indeed, the purpose of devotion and communion is not personal enjoyment, not even purest, spiritual ecstasy as a final, end; it is preparation for service. The Transfiguration experience was not meant merely to warm hearts and kindle the fires of worship – it was to help the Master to go on along His steep, rough way to the Cross; it was to strengthen the disciples’ faith in their Lord and in His Divine mission. No spiritual rapture is ever intended to end with itself – it is to send us out to do something for the world.
No vision of Christ granted to us is meant to exhaust itself in the bliss it brings – it fulfills its purpose only when its fervour makes us love Christ more intensely and enter into His service with new enthusiasm and energy. A philosopher when he had kindled a fire on a cold day and had been warmed by it would call himself before the bar of conscience and ask, “What did you do when you were warm?” He felt that the comfort he had received demanded some service to others in return. Every earthly comfort we enjoy should put into us a new impulse of helpfulness, if we are living rightly. Especially is this true of every spiritual comfort, every ecstasy that thrills our hearts while we worship, every feeling of warmth produced by the Divine love shed abroad in us by the Holy Spirit.
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