Healthy and Happy
The Christmas bells are ringing in the brightest day in the Christian calendar. The clock of time will soon strike for the birth of another twelvemonth, when every man will wish his neighbor a “Happy New Year!” To many it will no doubt be a day of sadness, for it will remind them of the loved ones whom the past year has buried out of their sight; but every genuine disciple of Jesus, every heir of heaven, ought to possess deep and abiding resources of joy, that lie as far beneath the tempests of trial as the depths of the Atlantic are beneath the storms that have lately torn its surface into foaming billows. Every healthy Christian ought to be a happy Christian under every stress of circumstances.
A living Christian who is worthy of the name must possess more or less of the holi- 7iess without which no man can see the Lord. There is a misconception and a prejudice in the minds of some good people in regard to this word, on account of the abuse of it by certain visionaries of the “perfectionist” school. But hoHness signifies health of heart and life. It is equivalent to the Saxon word wholihy and to be holy is really to be whole or healed. Sin is soul-sickness; regeneration by the Divine Spirit is recovery from that sickness. There is no condemnation of guilt to them who are in Christ Jesus; He is the physician who delivers them from deadly disease. If good health means misery, then is a sincere Christian a miserable mope; but if health means a happy condition, then should Christ’s redeemed ones be the most cheerful, sunny-hearted people in the community.
There are several characteristics of a true child of God. One of them is that he is forgiven. To be pardoned has made many a prison-door like a gate of paradise. The sweet sense of sin forgiven has been an ecstasy to thousands who had “groaned, being burdened,” but had found relief at the cross of Christ. Another evidence of spiritual health is a good conscience, — a conscience enlightened by the Bible, a conscience kept sweet and wholesome by prayer, a conscience that comforts its possessor, instead of tormenting him by a certain fearful looking-for of judgment. What a diseased liver is in the bodily organization, is a bad conscience in the spiritual man, it breeds continual mischief and misery. *’ How is your liver? “was the first question of a shrewd and humorous old minister to me on my entrance into the ministry. When I told him that it was sound, he replied,” Then jy// 7/ doT That Christian never sutTers from spiritual dyspepsia who keeps a conscience void of offence towards God and man.
A healthy soul has a strong appetite for Divine truth. He enjoys the daily manna of the Word, and has no lustings for the “flesh-pots “of the world. It is not the stimulant of spiced pastry that he is after, but the strong meat of the gospel as well as the honeycomb. His soul “■ delights itself in the fatness “of God’s Word. To some people Mr. Moody’s style of talking about the banquet which the Bible affords him seems like extravagance; the reason is, that their spiritual taste is utterly corrupted by feeding on such confectionery as novels and secular newspapers. A combination of Bible-diet and Bible-duties would soon make them as vigorous as Mr. Moody. If he did not show in his own conduct and condition the ‘’ feeding” he lives on, he would not make many converts.
Holiness is constant agreement with God. It is the agreement of love — deeper even and sweeter than the most unbroken wedlock. From this harmony of soul with the Divine Will flows a great deep, broad river of peace, which passeth all understanding and fathoming. This stream grows deeper and wider, until, like an Amazon, it empties into the ocean of eternal love. The holy believer — who accepts God’s promises more readily than the best government bonds, who shapes his life in conformity with Christ, who keeps his soul’s windows open towards the sun-rising, who makes even a cross the ladder for a climb into a higher fellowship with Jesus, who realizes that just before him lies the exceeding and eternal weight of glory, — cannot be made a sour or peevish or melancholy man by any outward circumstances. The holyminded Rutherford of Scotland wrote most of his immortal “Letters” within the cell of a martyr’s prison. They read like leaves from the tree of life, floated down on sunbeams. “Come, O my well-beloved!” he exclaims; “move fast, that we may meet at the banquet. I would not exchange one smile of Christ’s lovely face for kingdoms. There is no house-room for crosses in heaven. Sorrow and the saints are not married together; or, if it were so, heaven would divorce them.” The holiness of such a man is not the enthusiasm of a visionary or the mere outburst of transient emotion; it is the normal condition of the man, the wholeness of a soul that has been transformed by grace into the likeness and the life of Jesus Christ. Keeping Christ’s commandments keeps the eye clear and the temper sweet and the will submissive and the affections pure: in these lies the rich reward.
The highest type of piety is cheerful. The more we study the lives and examples of the healthiest Christians, the more we find them to be the men and women who walk in the sunshine. The Luthers, the Wilberforces, the Summerfields, the Guthrics, the Spurgeons, and the Norman Mc-Leeds were and are the living ilkistrations of the truth that close contact with God is the supremest source of happiness. There is such a thing as “the joy in the Holy Spirit.” There is a meat for the soul to feed on that this lying, deceitful, and deceived world knoweth not of. The measure of our holiness is the true measure of our happiness; it will be the measure of our final enjoyment of heaven.