“Strangers and pilgrims” (Heb. xi. 13).
If you have ever tried to plough a straight furrow in the country—we are
sorry for the man that does not know how to plough and more sorry for the
man that is too proud to want to know—you have found it necessary to have
two stakes in a line and to drive your horses by these stakes. If you have
only one stake before you, you will have no steadying point for your
vision, but you can wiggle about without knowing it and make your furrows
as crooked as a serpent’s coil; but if you have two stakes and ever keep
them in line, you cannot deviate an inch from a straight line, and your
furrow will be an arrow speeding to its course.
This has been a great lesson to us in our Christian life. If we would run
a straight course, we find that we must have two stakes, the near and the
distant. It is not enough to be living in the present, but it is a great
and glorious thing to have a distant goal, a definite object, a clear
purpose before us for which we are living, and unto which we are shaping
our present.