_Personal Changes_.
And we, ourselves, change also. As the years fly past, the most notable
fact about us, perhaps, is the changes that are going on in our own
experiences, our habits, our thoughts, our hopes, our conduct, our
character. How much there was about us, only a few years ago, which has
changed in the interval--nay, how much has grown different even since last
New Year's Day! Indeed, might we not say of a great deal in us, which
to-day is, that to-morrow it will be cast away for ever?
Have you, my friend, not had to mourn over some strange changes?
Has not your joy been often so quickly turned to sorrow that you have
wondered how you yourself could be the same person? Has not some trifling
circumstance often seemed to cloud your sky for days, darkening all the
great lights in your heaven, so that your whole past, and present, and
future have seemed different to you, and you stood in the stupor of
astonishment at the gloomy change? Has not your zeal for souls been
subject to like strange and unaccountable changes, so that the work you
once thought impossible you have found easy; or the work you once
delighted in, you now find hard, difficult, and barren? Has not your
freedom in prayer, and your desire for it, wavered between this and that
until you have not known what to think of yourself?
Has not your perception of duty, and your devotion to it, at one time
clear and strong, become at another so dim and feeble, that you have been
utterly ashamed of your wobbling and cowardice, and amazed at your
failure? And, most sorrowful of all, has not your love for your God and
Saviour been up and down--shamefully down--so that when you have
afterwards reflected on your coldness towards Him and His cause, you have
been covered with confusion and astonishment at the fickleness of your own
heart?
And more than this. How great are the changes wrought in us by the curbing
influence of time! How much that in youth and early manhood we meant to
do, and could do, and did do, has to be laid down, or left to others, as
our years approach the limits of their pilgrimage! I have known some men
who, for this reason alone, did not desire to live beyond the years of
strength and vigour--they preferred "to cease at once to work and live."
The loss by death, or disappointments worse than death, of our friends and
dear ones--what changes this also works! Unconsciously men narrow the
sphere of their sympathies. The mainspring of life--love--grows slowly
rusty for want of use, and from some hearts that were once true fountains
of joy to those around them, the living water almost ceases to flow.
Criticism, and fault-finding, and censoriousness too often take the place
of generous labour for the welfare of the world. This may, no doubt, arise
in part from the natural desire that others should profit by our past
experiences, which renders us the more observant of their conduct the more
we love. But, no matter what the cause, certain it is that within and
without all seems to change.
Is it not, then, a joy unspeakable that, amidst all this, whether we are
or are not fully alive to the weakness, and variableness, and
deceitfulness of our own hearts, we can look up to the ROCK that changeth
NOT? In the darkest hour of disappointment with ourselves; in the depths
of that miserable aftermath of sorrow and failure which follows all pride
and foolish self-assertion; in the miry pit of condemnation and guilt in
which sin always leaves the sinner, we can look up to Him whose power,
whose grace, whose love is ever the same.
Do you really believe it? There is a great hope in it for you if you do.
High above all your changes, high above all the storms and disappointments
that belong to them; high above all the wretched failure and doubting of
the "do-the-best-I-can" life you are living, He lives to bless, to save,
to uplift, to keep. Unnumbered multitudes, fighting their way to Him in
spite of the timidities and wobblings, the "couldn'ts" and "wouldn'ts" of
their own nature, have proved Him the Faithful and Unchanging God. Will
not you?