Consider that the fault here warned against is a universal one. What
different men we should be if our resolutions had fruited in conduct! In
all regions of life that is true, but most emphatically is it true in
regard to religion. The damning tragedy of many lives, and I dare say of
those of some of my hearers, is that men have over and over again
determined that they would be Christians, and they are not Christians
yet; just because they have let 'the native hue of resolution be
sicklied over' by some paleness or other, and so have resolved and
resolved and resolved till every nerve of action is rotted away, and
they will die unchristian. I dare say that there are men or women
listening to me now, perhaps with grey hairs upon them, who can remember
times, in the springtide of their youth, when they said, 'I will give my
heart to Jesus Christ, and set my faith upon Him'; and they have not
done it yet. Now, therefore, 'as there was a readiness to will, let
there be also the performance.'
But it is not only in regard to that most important of all resolves that
I wish to say a word. All Christians, I am sure, know what it is, over
and over again, to have had stirrings in their hearts which they have
been able to consolidate into determination, but have not been able to
carry into act. 'The children have come to the birth, and there is not
strength to bring them forth.' That is true about all of us, more or
less, and it is very solemnly true of a great many of us professing
Christians. We have tried to cure--we have determined that we will
cure--manifest and flagrant defects or faults in our Christian life. We
have resolved, and some nipping frost has come, and the blossoms have
dropped on the grass before they have ever set into fruit. I know that
is so about you, because I know that it is so about myself. And
therefore, dear brethren, I appeal to you, and ask you whether the
exhortation of my text has not a sharp point for every one of
us--whether the universality of this defect does not demand that we all
should gravely consider the exhortation here before us?
Then, again, let me remind you how this injunction is borne in upon us
by the consideration of the strength of the opposition with which we
have always to contend, in every honest attempt to bring to act our best
resolutions. Did you ever try to cure some little habit, some mere
trifle, a trick of manner or twist of the finger, or some attitude or
tone that might be ugly and awkward, and that people told you that it
would be better to get rid of? You know how hard it is. There is always
a tremendous gulf between the ideal and its realisation in life. As long
as we are moving _in vacuo_ we move without any friction or difficulty;
but as soon as we come out into a world where there are an atmosphere
and opposing forces, then friction comes in, and speed diminishes; and
we never become what we aim to be. We begin with grand purposes, and we
end with very poor results. We all start, in our early days, with the
notion that our lives are going to be radiant and beautiful, and all
unlike what the limitations of power and the antagonisms that we have to
meet make of them at last. The tree of our life's doings has to grow,
like those contorted pines on the slopes of the Alps, in many storms,
with heavy weights of snow on its branches, and beaten about by tempests
from every quarter of the heavens; and so it gets gnarled and knotted
and very unlike the symmetrical beauty that we dreamed would adorn it.
We begin with saying: 'Come! Let us build a tower whose top shall reach
to heaven'; and we are contented at last, if we have put up some little
tumble-down shed where we can get shelter for our heads from the blast.
And the difficulty in bringing into action our best selves besets us in
the matter of translating our resolutions into practice. What are
arrayed against it? A feeble will, enslaved too often by passions and
flesh and habits, and all about us lie obstacles to our carrying into
action our conscientious convictions, our deepest resolutions; obstacles
to our being true to our true selves; to which obstacles, alas, far too
many of us habitually, and all of us occasionally, succumb. That being
the case, do not we all need to ponder in our deepest hearts, and to
pray for grace to make the motto of our lives, 'As there was a readiness
to will, let there be a performance'?