Produced by Al Haines
Making the Most of Life
BY
J. R. MILLER, D.D.
AUTHOR OF "SILENT TIMES," "THINGS TO LIVE FOR," "BUILDING OF
CHARACTER," "THE GOLDEN GATE OF PRAYER," ETC.
"I am the Lord thy God
Which teacheth to profit."
ISAIAH.
New York
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1891, by T. Y. CROWELL & Co.
A WORD OF INTRODUCTION.
Alexander was accustomed to say; "Philip of Macedon gave me life, but
it was Aristotle who taught me how to make the most of life."
To have the gift of life is a solemn thing. Life is God's most sacred
trust. It is not ours to do with as we please; it must be accounted
for, every particle, every power, every possibility of it.
These chapters are written with the purpose and hope of stimulating
those who may read them to earnest and worthy living. If they seem
urgent, if they present continually motives of thoughtfulness, if they
dwell almost exclusively on the side of obligation and responsibility,
if they make duty ever prominent and call to self-renunciation and
self-sacrifice, leaving small space for play, it is because life itself
is really most serious, and because we must meet it seriously,
recognizing its sacred meaning and girding ourselves for it with all
earnestness and energy.
If this book shall teach any how to make the most of the life God has
entrusted to them, that will be reward enough for the work of its
preparation. To this service it is affectionately dedicated, in the
name of Him who made the most of his blessed life by losing it in
love's sacrifice, and who calls us also to die to self that we may live
unto God.
J. R. M.
PHILADELPHIA.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. MAKING THE MOST OF LIFE
II. LAID ON GOD'S ALTAR
III. CHRIST'S INTEREST IN OUR COMMON LIFE
IV. THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRAYER
V. GETTING CHRIST'S TOUCH
VI. THE BLESSING OF A BURDEN
VII. HEART-PEACE BEFORE MINISTRY
VIII. MORAL CURVATURES
IX. TRANSFIGURED LIVES
X. THE INTERPRETATION OF SORROW
XI. OTHER PEOPLE
XII. THE BLESSING OF FAITHFULNESS
XIII. WITHOUT AXE OR HAMMER
XIV. DOING THINGS FOR CHRIST
XV. HELPING AND OVER-HELPING
XVI. THE ONLY ONE
XVII. SWIFTNESS IN DUTY
XVIII. THE SHADOWS WE CAST
XIX. THE MEANING OF OPPORTUNITIES
XX. THE SIN OF INGRATITUDE
XXI. SOME SECRETS OF HAPPY HOME LIFE
XXII. GOD'S WINTER PLANTS
XXIII. UNFINISHED LIFE-BUILDING
XXIV. IRON SHOES FOR ROUGH ROADS
XXV. THE SHUTTING OF DOCKS
MAKING THE MOST OF LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
MAKING THE MOST OF LIFE.
"Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth;
For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice,
And whoso suffers most hath most to give."
--_The Disciples._
According to our Lord's teaching, we can make the most of our life by
losing it. He says that losing the life for his sake is saving it.
There is a lower self that must be trampled down and trampled to death
by the higher self. The alabaster vase must be broken, that the
ointment may flow out to fill the house. The grapes must be crushed,
that there may be wine to drink. The wheat must be bruised, before it
can become bread to feed hunger.
It is so in life. Whole, unbruised, unbroken men are of but little
use. True living is really a succession of battles, in which the
better triumphs over the worse, the spirit over the flesh. Until we
cease to live for self, we have not begun to live at all.
We can never become truly useful and helpful to others until we have
learned this lesson. One may live for self and yet do many pleasant
things for others; but one's life can never become the great blessing
to the world it was meant to be until the law of self-sacrifice has
become its heart principle.
A great oak stands in the forest. It is beautiful in its majesty; it
is ornamental; it casts a pleasant shade. Under its branches the
children play; among its boughs the birds sing. One day the woodman
comes with his axe, and the tree quivers in all its branches, under his
sturdy blows. "I am being destroyed," it cries. So it seems, as the
great tree crashes down to the ground. And the children are sad
because they can play no more beneath the broad branches; the birds
grieve because they can no more nest and sing amid the summer foliage.
But let us follow the tree's history. It is cut into boards, and built
into a beautiful cottage, where human hearts find their happy nest. Or
it is used in making a great organ which leads the worship of a
congregation. The losing of its life was the saving of it. It died
that it might become deeply, truly useful.
The plates, cups, dishes, and vases which we use in our homes and on
our tables, once lay as common clay in the earth, quiet and restful,
but in no way doing good, serving man. Then came men with picks, and
the clay was rudely torn out and plunged into a mortar and beaten and
ground in a mill, then pressed, and then put into a furnace, and burned
and burned, at last coming forth in beauty, and beginning its history
of usefulness. It was apparently destroyed that it might begin to be
of service.
A great church-building is going up, and the stones that are being laid
on the walls are brought out of the dark quarry for this purpose. We
can imagine them complaining, groaning, and repining, as the quarry
men's drills and hammers struck them. They supposed they were being
destroyed as they were torn out from the bed of rock where they had
lain undisturbed for ages, and were cut into blocks, and lifted out,
and then as they were chiselled and dressed into form. But they were
being destroyed only that they might become useful. They become part
of a new sanctuary, in which God is to be worshipped, where the Gospel
will be preached, where penitent sinners will find the Christ-Saviour,
where sorrowing ones will be comforted. Surely it was better that
these stones should be torn out, even amid agony, and built into the
wall of the church, than that they should have lain ages more,
undisturbed in the dark quarry. They were saved from uselessness by
being destroyed.
These are simple illustrations of the law which applies also in human
life. We must die to be useful--to be truly a blessing. Our Lord put
this truth in a little parable, when he said that the seed must fall
into the earth and die that it may bear fruit. Christ's own cross is
the highest illustration of this. His friends said he wasted his
precious life; but was that life wasted when Jesus was crucified?
George MacDonald in one of his little poems, with deep spiritual
insight, presents this truth of the blessed gain of Christ's life
through his sacrifice and death:--
"For three and thirty years, a living seed,
A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world's side,
Thy death and rising, thou didst calmly bide;
Sore compassed by many a clinging weed
Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and need;
Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied;
Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride;
Until at length was done the awful deed,
And thou didst lie outworn in stony bower--
Three days asleep--oh, slumber godlike, brief,
For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief,
Heaven's seed, Thou diedst, that out of thee might tower
Aloft, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf
Of all Humanity the crimson flower."
People said that Harriet Newell's beautiful life was wasted when she
gave it to missions, and then died and was buried far from home--bride,
missionary, mother, saint, all in one short year,--without even telling
to one heathen woman or child the story of the Saviour. But was that
lovely young life indeed wasted? No; all this century her name has
been one of the strongest inspirations to missionary work, and her
influence has brooded everywhere, touching thousands of hearts of
gentle women and strong men, as the story of her consecration has been
told. Had Harriet Newell lived a thousand years of quiet, sweet life
at home, she could not have done the work that she did in one short
year by giving her life, as it seemed, an unavailing sacrifice. She
lost her life that she might save it. She died that she might live.
She offered herself a living sacrifice that she might become useful.
In heart and spirit we must all do the same if we would ever be a real
blessing in the world. We must be willing to lose our life--to
sacrifice ourself, to give up our own way, our own ease, our own
comfort, possibly even our own life; for there come times when one's
life must literally be lost in order to be saved.
It was in a mine in England. There had been a fearful explosion, and
the men came rushing up from the lower level, right into the danger of
the deathly afterblast; when the only chance of safety was in another
shaft. And one man knew this and stood there in the dangerous passage,
warning the men. When urged to go himself the safe way, he said, "No;
some one must stay here to guide the others." Is there any heroism of
this world's life finer than that?
It was at Fredericksburg, after a bloody battle. Hundreds of Union
soldiers lay wounded on the field. All night and all next day the
space was swept by artillery from both armies; and no one could venture
to the sufferers' relief. All that time, too, there went up from the
field agonizing cries for water, but there was no response save the
roar of the guns. At length, however, one brave fellow behind the
ramparts, a Southern soldier, felt that he could endure these piteous
cries no longer. His compassion rose superior to his love of life.
"General," said Richard Kirkland to his commander, "I can't stand this.
Those poor souls out there have been praying for water all night and
all day, and it is more than I can bear. I ask permission to carry
them water."
The general assured him that it would be instant death for him to
appear upon the field, but he begged so earnestly that the officer,
admiring his noble devotion to humanity, could not refuse his request.
Provided with a supply of water, the brave soldier stepped over the
wall and went on his Christ-like errand. From both sides wondering
eyes looked on as he knelt by the nearest sufferer, and gently raising
his head, held the cooling cup to his parched lips. At once the Union
soldiers understood what the soldier in gray was doing for their own
wounded comrades, and not a shot was fired. For an hour and a half he
continued his work, giving drink to the thirsty, straightening cramped
and mangled limbs, pillowing men's heads on their knapsacks, and
spreading blankets and army coats over them, tenderly as a mother would
cover her child; and all the while, until this angel-ministry was
finished, the fusillade of death was hushed.
Again we must admire the heroism that led this brave soldier in gray so
utterly to forget himself for the sake of doing a deed of mercy to his
enemies. There is more grandeur in five minutes of such
self-renunciation than in a whole lifetime of self-interest and
self-seeking. There is something Christly in it. How poor, paltry,
and mean, alongside the records of such deeds, appear men's selfish
strivings, self-interests' boldest venturing!
We must get the same spirit in us if we would become in any large and
true sense a blessing to the world. We must die to live. We must lose
our life to save it. We must lay self on the altar to be consumed in
the fire of love, in order to glorify God and do good to men. Our work
may be fair, even though mingled with self; but it is only when self is
sacrificed, burned on the altar of consecration, consumed in the hot
flames of love, that our work becomes really our best, a fit offering
to be made to our King.
We must not fear that in such sacrifice, such renunciation and
annihilation of self, we shall lose ourselves. God will remember every
deed of love, every forgetting of self, every emptying out of life.
Though we work in obscurest places, where no human tongue shall ever
voice our praise, still there is a record kept, and some day rich and
glorious reward will be given. Is not God's praise better than man's?
"Ungathered beauties of a bounteous earth,
Wild flowers which grow on mountain-paths untrod.
White water-lilies looking up to God
From solitary tarns--and human worth
Doing meek duty that no glory gains,
Heroic souls in secret places sown,
To live, to suffer, and to die unknown--
Are not that loveliness and all these pains
Wasted? Alas, then does it not suffice
That God is on the mountain, by the lake,
And in each simple duty, for whose sake
His children give their very blood as price?
The Father sees. If this does not repay,
What else? For plucked flowers fade and praises slay."
Mary's ointment was wasted when she broke the vase and poured it upon
her Lord. Yes; but suppose she had left the ointment in the unbroken
vase? What remembrance would it then have had? Would there have been
any mention of it on the Gospel pages? Would her deed of careful
keeping have been told over all the world? She broke the vase and
poured it out, lost it, sacrificed it, and now the perfume fills all
the earth. We may keep our life if we will, carefully preserving it
from waste; but we shall have no reward, no honor from it, at the last.
But if we empty it out in loving service, we shall make it a lasting
blessing to the world, and we shall be remembered forever.