The Light of Life
Psalm xxxvi. 9 v.
“With Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light.”
Do you know the connection between the fulness of life and the vision of brightness? Do you know what it is to have a joy from sheer vitality, to be glad from the very vigour of your strength? It is something like the peace that passeth understanding; it makes one unaccountably happy, unreasonably comfortable. Many a time we laugh when by the standard of the world we ought to cry. The life can often see what the eye cannot see — hope. It is hard to make youth feel impossibility. You may prove to the eye a thousand times that there is no abatement of the flood; but the heart of vigorous life shall catch sight of Ararat. The dove of the spirit brings its olive-branch ere the ark of the flesh has descried land. Hundreds walk by the light of life who would fall by the light of facts. The still, small voice of health within outweighs all the testimony of the thunder and the earthquake and the fire. In vain shall the tempest cry to my soul, “Flee as a bird to thy mountain,” if my soul has said to itself: “Peace, be still.”
Son of Man, it is “more life and fuller” that I want from Thee — not more gardens, not more sunbeams, not more beauties, but more life. When my life is low, I see nothing fair; Eden becomes Gethsemane. My voice Thou canst hear in the morning, because in the morning my life is fullest. But at mid-day, when the inner sun declines, the gates of the New Jerusalem ope for me in vain; I pass the pearls unseen, I tread the diamonds unknown. Nothing but blood can save me from blindness; transfuse Thy blood into my soul. Grive me more nerve, more sinew, more strength. I ask not new sight; I ask new power of seeing. The wood is there, and the ram for the offering is there, if only the inner burning were there. I need no better revelation; I want Thy saving health. I want to count the unnoted sunbeams, to mark the unnumbered wells, to record the unacknowledged joys. I want, like Elijah, to see the seven thousand in the place where I thought myself alone, to behold the chariots and horsemen where I knew only the valley of the shadow. There shall be a new heaven and a new earth for me when I have received the light of life.