Seeking Life

“For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live.” — AMOS v. 4.

THESE are Old Testament words, and the Old Testament is everywhere a preparation and anticipation of the New. Its promises are types of better things which men had not yet learned to desire, but for which they were made ready by the clear, tangible benefits which were put at once into their possession. You want to prepare a child to receive from you the most spiritual blessings. You want to give him courage, patience, truth. You want to win him to Christ. But how can you begin? It may be — and it is perfectly legitimate if it is frankly done — it may be that you have to gain his confidence by giving him at once the things which he can understand, shelter and food and clothes and playthings. Then, when he trusts you and knows that you mean his good, you may go on and give him the far more precious spiritual gifts.

Now, these two treatments are really the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament gave the people Moses, who led them out of a bodily slavery in Egypt into a physical plenty and luxuriance in Canaan. If they had really been won by that mercy into confidence in and love for God, they would have been ready for the larger gift when the New Testament offered them Christ, the spiritual Deliverer who came to lead them out of the slavery of sin into the freedom and joy of holiness. This is the simplest of all the relations between the outward and visible mercies of God, on one hand, and the inward and spiritual mercies on the other — that the visible mercies are given us to win our confidence, so that He can give us the spiritual mercies. With this idea clearly in our minds, we can often see issuing from it glimpses of light upon the dark parts of God’s treatment of us — why this mercy was given us when we seemed so undeserving, and why that other was snatched away when we were making only a sensual and selfish use of it.

These words of Amos, then, out of the Old Testament, probably had at first their purely physical application: “Thus saith the Lord, Seek ye me, and ye shall live.” It was that promise of long life, as a reward of obedience, which is heard all through the older Dispensation. That promise had met Abraham at his first calling. It had been repeated in the ears of all the Patriarchs. It had dropped in continual reiteration of encouragement and warning upon all the various conditions of that ever-changing Jewish history: “Be obedient, and you shall live. Break my laws, and you shall die,”

There was great truth and reality in that old Jewish motive. We know how many men distrust it now, how many men are wholly unable to believe that there is any connection between the length of men’s lives and their faithful keeping of God’s laws. And yet it is very strange that while, on one side, men it seems are learning to doubt this more and more; at the same time, on another side, men are coming to believe it as their fathers never did. In tracing the connection with fearful clearness between disease and vice, in showing how the evils which men have assigned to chance or fate come really from the violation of natural laws, in every new connection which is traced between the welfare of the physical frame and the moralities, such as sobriety, purity, peace, — in all these departments where our modern spirit is so busy, we are really gathering a new and mighty emphasis into the old words of God to the house of Israel: “Seek ye me, and ye shall live.” We may be stopping short-sightedly in second causes, and talking of “laws of nature” rather than of “God,” but this belief, which is growing stronger and stronger, — that moral character and physical well-being have to do with one another, — must finally break through everything between, and find the real cause of such a connection in a personal God, whom to obey is to live, whom to disobey is to die.

But now let us take the New Testament meaning of this Old Testament promise. When God told

His people that they should have long lives, that their bodies should be so strong and vigorous that they should last out many years — that was a great promise in itself. Physical life is good. To see the sun, to tread the earth, to feel life singing through our veins is very good; we feel it so. But man, when he is at his best, and God, who always is at His best, alike refuse to think of this physical life as final. At its highest height it means some thing higher than itself. Both as type and as instrument, the body in its best health stands for the healthy soul behind it. All that we say of the body may be said of the soul as well. It, too, lives and dies, is sick or healthy, suffers and enjoys, grows and decays. And when we are truly sensible of the superior value of the soul, we are ready to take every new gift of strength that God gives the body, as a token from Him that He means the soul to be strong. So the New Testament correspondent of the Old Testament promise of physical life, is spiritual life, the soul’s life.

We know what is meant by a live soul. The young people who are listening to me have begun perhaps to discover already how much of their souls there is that is really not alive, to feel how impeded and restrained they are. Those of you who are older know the long struggle against spiritual deadness only too well. Perhaps you have given it up in despair, and have thrown forward into the other world all the hope that you have yet left of spiritual life. ‘’When I get there, then I shall live,” you say. The life of the soul means the perfectly free and healthy action of all its powers on every side. When we get sight of that, when we hear that promise in its words, then the Old Testament offer, “Seek me, and your soul shall live,” has turned into the New Testament invitation, “He that hath the Son hath Life.” “Because I live, ye shall live also.”

So far we have been trying to see what, in the deepest sense, it really is to live. But we want to understand also what it is to “seek the Lord,” which is declared to be the condition of true life. When we know that, we shall be ready to bind the two together and understand the whole. What is it, then, to seek anything which is a condition of life? I suppose it is to put one’s self into sympathy or harmony with that thing and its processes, so that we shall not work against it, but work with it, and be always carried along by its currents to our best results.

Take one or two universal illustrations of this idea. We are all beings living in the midst of nature. Natural forces in immense variety are all around us. They are working ceaselessly either to build up or to destroy our human life. Whether they build us or destroy us depends upon how we relate ourselves to them. If we are willing to study them and obey them, to find the nature of fire, water, air, and treat them in conformity with their natures, then they are our servants and we live by them. If we disregard their natures, and let our lives run across their processes at random, how soon they sweep us aside and kill us! The fire burns us or the water drowns us ruthlessly. They are not life, but death, to us.

When one has learnt all this, when he has seen how positive and imperious, how jealous Nature is, how ready to help us, but how determined that it must be in her own way, well may he hear Nature crying out to him and all his human brethren, “Seek me, and ye shall live.” With all her myriad voices she implores men to understand her, so that they may intelligently suit their lives to her, and draw her richness from her thousand breasts: “I want to help and feed you, but I cannot if you will not seek me, bending your intelligence and your will to me.” What has made the difference between your civilized house and the hut of the savage? It is not wholly, but in part it is, that man has intelligently sought nature, and so has lived more fully. He has learnt the nature of wood and stone and clay and iron, and has overcome them all by yielding to them, in the course of the ages that lie between the mansion and the wigwam.

Or, again, we are all living under a fixed government and certain laws. Our national life and social life have running through them certain great shafts of law, to which everything must be bound. Those laws have life and death within them. By them the rich life of our most perfect household is protected; by them our noblest citizen has been led on to the influence which he enjoys; and by them the poor wretch who was condemned for murder yesterday must lose his life. We love the laws and all the deeper principles of right and wrong that lie below them; we love them and we live in them, and all our life enlarges. We put ourselves into the attitude of obedience, and every little statute on the books becomes the ally of our living. Or, we grow obstinate and wilful, and every slightest law, every small conventionality, is up against us and will not rest till we are hunted down. The strong wind of righteousness blows across the world. If we will walk with it, it all helps us. If we will walk against it, every little zephyr in it becomes our enemy and buffets us. What has made the difference between the well-esteemed citizen who has justly won his fellow-men’s honor, and your poor outcast and vagabond who has won every man’s contempt or, at the best, his pity? Is it not that one has worked with the laws all his life, and the other has worked with the law in his face all the way? When we see how clear and positive all this is, we can hear all the laws — first the great solemn tones of the fundamental moral law, the law of right and wrong, speaking behind all; and then the chorus of its children, all the special statutes to which the moral law has given birth — calling together in our ears, “‘Seek me, and ye shall live.’ Understand me and obey me; so only in a law-governed world can men’s lives come to their best.”

Or, once more, the same is true of humankind. We get a large part of the stimulus of our life from one another. The most seemingly self-dependent of us has not all his springs in himself. He draws much of his best subterraneously from his neighbors. But how do we get life from one another?

Is it by sympathy or by antagonism? Is it by intelligence or misconception? Ah, you must know how dry and fruitless your best friend was to you until you really understood him. His acts, which now are all full of inspiration for you, were dead enough until you saw the soul with which he did them. His words, which now fire your enthusiasm, were cold as ice until you knew the friendly heart they sprang from. You know another man, perhaps, who does not comprehend this inspiring friend of yours. He is always coming up the stream, always coming into hostile contact with him. When he meets your friend, he is not stimulated to his best, as you are, but crushed into stupidity or exasperated into rudeness. You feel that it is better for them not to meet. What is the difference? Are you not sure that it is a lack of sympathy? Your friend cannot give himself to one who will not come to him. To you he gives himself more and more. “Seek me, and you shall live,” he is always crying to you. “I sought him, and did live” seems to you, as you look back, to tell all the story of your life with him. Some men are naturally and always seekers, in the sense which I have tried to make plain by all these illustrations. I do not mean that they are always writhing and struggling after some new thing, but they are ready and quick of sympathy, and so they enter freely into relations with people and things, and get the best out of everything. They are not suspicious. They have largeness and spirituality. They see what people and things are trying to do. They discern which way the most sluggishlooking stream is really running; and, quickly sympathizing with its movement, they gain its stimulus. Seeking everything with instinctive sympathy, they seem to live by everything. All things make contribution to their lives. For them birds sing and breezes blow The laws of the State, the forces of Society, seem to work for their good. And every where that they go, the taste, the culture, the vitality, the character of the men whom they meet, seems to be brought out instantly and shared with them. Men, women, and children help them. So they put everything under tribute, not by exacting demands, but by the cordial way with which they enter into the life of everything and get its movement, as a man gets the movement of the stream on which he floats.

But we must leave our illustrations and go on. The world is not ultimately governed by either of these forces of which we have been speaking — by natural forces, by law, or by man. Behind them all, under them all, is God. It is beautiful to look abroad and see how everywhere men, sure that they had not got to the end of things until they found Him, have always pushed on through everything that stood between, and discovered God at last. Nature has seemed to men shallow unless His will was in it. Law has seemed artificial unless it issued from His nature. Man has seemed unaccountable save as His child. And so we all feel God behind the whole. No doubt we feel Him very differently. The boy’s heart leaps with one movement at His discovered presence, and the old man’s with another.

One soul discovers Him in the blueness of the peaceful sky, and another sees His fire burn down in the red chasm of a sin’s punishment; but most wonderful of all things in the world is this endless pressure of all souls backward, this refusal to be satisfied until we find God.

And when God once has been discovered, there must be one purpose for a man who wants to live his fullest life that will overtop every other purpose. And that purpose must be to attain the most perfect sympathy and co-operation with God. If by deep sympathy with nature we get her life; if by under standing the law and obeying it, we make it build us up to our best; if by knowing and co-operating with a man we share his goodness and vitality; what then of God? If we can understand and obey and sympathize with and co-operate with Him, then in the same way, His life shall be our life, we shall live by Him; in one word, if we seek Him, we shall truly live.

“Seek Him” — have we not found out something of what that deep word means? It is the living in His sympathy, to love His loves and hate His hates, to think His thoughts after Him, to see the working out of His purposes and make them our own, and to rejoice if we can put a finger’s strength to their fulfilment, — this is to seek God. And He who does this gets God’s life. He seeks God, and he lives.

I am anxious to make the seeking of God appear to be this profound and thorough thing, because so often, as I think, the enfeeblement of religion has

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come in just here, — by making the search after God seem something different from this. Ah, my dear friends, it is not seeking God’s favor; it is seeking God Himself. It is not hurrying to Him with sins to be forgiven, merely because it is not safe to stay away. The search after forgiveness is a noble thing, but only noble as behind it there abides a deep dissatisfaction with our absence from the Lord, and an eager impatience with the wickedness that stands between our souls and Him. “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found; call ye upon him while he is near,” — what is the warning that is given there? What is the danger that is threatened in those oft-quoted words? Is it that if we do not ask forgiveness, some day God will be angry and say, “I will not give you forgiveness now, no matter how you beg; “? Is it not — and is not that far more terrible?

—that if we will not bind our life to His life, some day our life shall die out in all its best parts; that the perception and power of holiness will leave us; that God will carry on His great and beautiful purposes, and we shall have no part in them; that we shall miss all the best that we might be, because we would not try to love and be like Him by whom only we can be our best? This, this is the dreadful death that must come if we do not seek God.

And so, assuredly, this must be what is meant by the work of Christ in reconciling man to God, His making peace between man and God. If He did this, if by His life and death He made it more possible, not for mankind in the aggregate, but for every man, for you and me, to enter into such sympathy with God, and so understand and work with Him that our souls should be filled with His life, — then is not His spiritual mediatorship clear? As plainly as if I saw Him standing there, a mighty Figure with one hand taking glowing motives and infinite ambitions like burning coals off the altar that stands before God’s throne, and with the other touching those coals to the lips of a man and sending their power into his heart, — so plainly stands Jesus Christ between man and God; not separating them, but bringing them close together; interpreting God to man, that so man may be filled with God.

What does Mary Magdalen know about God? What does she care about the way He works? But Jesus Christ comes, and see how merciful He is, how true, how pure! Burning in every act He does, she sees one great desire, one hunger after holiness for Himself and for His brethren. She sees that and understands it; she is taken possession of by it. And then Jesus just turns to her and says: “That is God. ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.’ Let that new craving grow; seek Him more and more earnestly, and more and more you shall be purified. His new life in you shall cast your old life out.” What a mediatorship was there! And when you cannot find God, and the Saviour shows Him to you; when you cannot tell which way the Father is walking, and the Son comes and points Him out to you and says, “There!” so that you can run after Him with every perception of duty just as clear as sunlight, — then Christ is your Mediator.

The perfect illustration of our text is in the life of Jesus Himself. He sought God, and He lived. We must know far more than we do of the mysterious separation which the Incarnation brought between the Father and the Son, before we can understand what it was for the Son to “seek” the Father; but all through the Gospels there is something to which we cannot give any other name. Jesus is seeking God, reaching after complete sympathy, under standing the eternal purposes and rejoicing to work with them, coming near to His Father, and getting from that seeking all the wonderful, unceasing, beautiful inflow of life that filled His whole career. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,” was His story of the whole.

More important than all our attempts to define the relations of the Eternal Son and the Eternal Father, I think, it is to apprehend this perfect oneness of their thoughts and plans, which made all the life of the Father the life of the Son, too. Some times this seeking of God by Jesus takes a special utterance. Christ spends the whole night on a mountain, or by the passover table, or from the cross prays God to make His way more clear and show Himself to Him more perfectly. They are most touching utterances, but even in them we hardly find such an impression as gathers in us from frequent reading of the Gospels — that Christ was always pressing His life closer to God’s life, finding out more and more what were God’s purposes, giving Himself to those purposes more and more completely, and so more and more deeply living by 14 SEEKING LIFE

God. It comes from many little intimations, but it leaves with us the perfect picture of a soul always in deepening sympathy with God, and so always more and more thoroughly alive, but never so alive as when the death of the body set it free for perfect union with Divinity.

Have we not then come to something clear about this whole command, or let us better call it this invitation of God? God is the Father and Governor of life. If through a childlike love and obedience we enter into His sympathy, and catch His meanings, and are helping in any humble way towards His results; then our best powers of life come forth and do their work, and we genuinely live. All this is warmed into a glorious and inspiring promise as God calls to us, ‘’Seek ye me, and live.”

There are a few simple inferences to be drawn from all this, about the character of the Christian life which, I hope, may be of use to some. The first is, that the Christian life will be a gradual thing, and that we ought not to be surprised if it is slow. That very word, “seek” — think how it sounds. There is no suddenness about it. It does not describe a leap which carries one instantly from the ground below to the battlements above; it has a sound of perseverance, it makes us think of men deep underground digging for treasures, or of ships out at sea beating week after week towards their harbor, or of students growing gray over their books in tracing the long obscure lines that lead toward the truth. Certainly it has no promise of complete, immediate attainment. And there are many of us, and many passages in the experience of all of us, when, conscious of the gradualness of our new life, earnestly resolved to persevere unto the end, — nay, meeting encouragement along the way and humbly certain that God is showing Himself to us more and more, but still wondering why it is so slow, missing the sudden leap to peace and perfectness which, it may be, we expected, — at such times that word “seek” falls on us like a benediction with its prophecy of gradualness, its encouragement to perseverance, and its promise of success. If it is the benediction that we need, let us take it to-day!

Another inference will be that we shall find the tests and satisfactions of our service of God in our common experiences, in the deepening of our most common days. The life that is to be given to us is no supernal thing that cannot be recognised except in the new light of another world. It is the bringing out of these familiar powers, the endowment of our common relationships with profoundness and sanctity. If you seek God, then, what may you expect? First of all, most of all, that the simplest things which have seemed shallow to you will grow deep and sacred. It is like taking a northern seed down into the tropics; what does it mean to it? You plant it there, and in that richer ground, under that gorgeous sun, see how it grows into a luxuriance that was hardly hinted by the meagreness of the fruitage which it yielded on the rocky, windy New England hillside. Or, it is like stooping and lifting under water a weight, with all the water’s buoyancy to help you. You have been trying to do your work as father, mother, brother, sister, schoolboy, clerk, merchant, citizen, from lower motives, from self-interest or mere good-nature. But if you begin to seek God through Christ, you throw your life into His life and all these things mean more to you; they change their look and are more sacred. The drudgery and tiresomeness drop out of them. They are His service. As different as an orange-tree struggling for life here and getting to nothing after all but poor green fruit, and an orange-tree under its own southern sky, is the duty of home-life done for one’s own self, and that done for God.

Ah! it is good to look far off and see the heaven where we are to live some day, to catch the vision of its golden pinnacles and hear some strain of its music wafted to us from far away; but it is better still to see this present made glorious by present grace, to find these streets of duty turned to gold, and these words of thanksgiving setting themselves to music. That is a surer witness still that we are God’s.

Another power of this invitation will be the motive it will give you to get rid of sin. The reason why men do not think their sins are very bad is, that they are not trying to be very good. But if you are really trying to be like God, then everything that keeps you from Him will declare its wickedness. That is the way, poor trifler, to make your trifling show its sinfulness! Do not sit contemplating your own poor foolish actions, your self-indulgences, your wastings and murderings of time, saying of each of them, “There is no harm in this, or this, or this.” Look away from them; look at God. Gaze till your soul is full upon the glory of His nature and His life. Then take in the idea that you have some part of His nature, and He has called you to share His life. Realize that it is possible for you to understand Him, and to work for what He is working for. Think what your life would be if you did that. Fill your soul with such a prospect; then turn back suddenly and see the idleness, the dissipation, the miserable self-indulgence, which are keeping you from living that life; and then ask yourself if there is no harm in it, ask yourself if it is not wicked. There is the place for you to see your sin, against what your sin hinders. Perhaps that also is the way for you to hate your sin, and conquer it and escape from its slavery forever.

No one can doubt what is the true time for this seeking of God. It may come at the very end of life. Just when the stream is almost dry, when, having run for years over the sandy ground of selfishness, it has only a few drops left of vital will, those few drops, we doubt not, may be taken up and poured into the great current of God’s life. And that great current will not cast them out; it will treasure them, no doubt, and carry them on to some success. The dying man may be swept into the stream of God, and just as he dies begin to live. Of that we feel sure. We love to think of what the other world may have in store for such lives as the penitent thief’s, — lives whose dying was the 18 SEEKING LIFE

beginning of their living. But we never think of such lives as more than exceptions. They are poor makeshifts after all. It is for such as you, my dear friends, young men and women with a full, fresh life to give, that giving the life to God really means something great and beautiful.

Think what it means. To take all these powers that are just opened or just opening, and say: “All these shall be used for doing not what I want, but what God wants. If my wants and His wants disagree, I will defeat myself to serve Him until, as I grow like Him, my wants and His wants come to be the same, and thenceforth I shall serve myself in serving Him. This I will do because He is my Father, and has shown me His love by Jesus Christ, my Lord.”

O my dear friends, that is Salvation. That is to be saved — to give the life while it is rich and vigorous and young to God. Then it need not run weak and shallow at first, and only at last be refreshed; it may grow stronger and deeper all the way from the beginning, flowing in the ever-deepening channels of His love here, until it is received into the ocean of His love hereafter.