Permanent Elation

Psalm xxviii. 9 v.
“Lift them up for ever.”

What a bold aspiration! To have a perpetual How of spirits, to be ever in the air, always on the wing, invariably above the common plain — surely it is the wildest dream! Can any man reach it? Has not Peter to dismount from his air-built tabernacle, and Paul from his height in the third heaven? I never get my exaltation without getting my thorn. Every mile I soar above the plain is paid for with depression. Even where I gain the goal, the goal itself becomes common-place. The star falls from heaven when I touch it; the manna of wonder ceases, and I eat the old corn of the land. I am the child of reaction; how dare I ask to be lifted up for ever?

Be still, my soul; thou hast mistaken the message of thy Father. He does not wish to lift thee above the plain; He wants to lift the plain itself. He would uplift thee as the Son of Man was lifted up — through the Cross. The joy He seeks for thee is the joy of thy Lord. It is not the elevation of thy heart above its cares; it is the elevation of the cares themselves. He does not promise to arrest depression, but He promises that depression shall not arrest thee. He asks thee to believe that even when under the cloud thou art moving still, moving upward, moving onward. “He giveth to His beloved in their sleep” — in their very moments of reaction. The heart cannot beat without its intervening pauses. Thy pauses are thy Father’s milestones, oh my soul. They are the times when thou hast ceased to gird thyself, and art carried on a bed; but thou art carried none the less, and carried up the hill. And when thou shalt awake from thy faintness, it shall not be in the spot where thou hast lain down. The moments of seeming waste shall have borne thee leagues aloft. Thou shalt trace thy progress in the tracks thou hast left behind. Thou shalt look out upon the pathway with surprise, and say, “I have been lifted up for ever.”