Healing Beams

He Sun of righteousness, when He rises on those that fear the Lord, gives them healing. There

is healing in His wings. By the wings of the sun are meant the beams that shoot up from it into the air, or seem to slant down from it when it is aloft in the sky. There is really healing to men’s bodies in the sun. Have we not seen them come to the sunny land consumptive and doubled with weakness, and as they have sat in the sun and warmed themselves for a few weeks, the wound within the lung has begun to heal, and the consumptive man has breathed again, and you have seen that he would live. Some have gone thither who scarce could speak, and beneath the sun they began to speak again, like men whose youth has been renewed. The sun is the great physician. Where he enters not the physician will be needed, but where he shines men speedily revive. As for the Sun of Righteousness, oh, how He heals the sick! 1 would like sick Christians to sit in His sunlight by the year together, if you did nothing else but bask there, as animals delight to bask in the sun. The flowers know the sun, and they turn their cups to him and drink in of the health he gives them from his golden store. Oh, that we had as much sense to know the Sun of Righteousness, that we might by prayer, and meditation, and holy living, bask and sun ourselves in His delicious beams! We shall be strong indeed if He

* Malachi iv.

rises upon us with healing in His wings. He has risen, but we wander into the shade: He has risen, but we get into the ice wells of worldliness and sin, and shut out His warmth, and then we wonder we are sick, but sick we always shall be till we come out into the light again, and Jesus shines on us from morn till eve.

When the Sun of Righteousness shines the Christian gets his liberty. “Ye shall go forth.” I have been staying where the invalid does not venture out if the wind blows, and if it is a little chill and the sun is not bright he must stay indoors or lose the benefit he has received; but when the sun is out and the air is calm, then he comes forth and leaves his bedroom, and is all alive once more. There are Christians who have been kept indoors a long time; they have not walked the length of the promise, nor spied out the breadth of the covenant, nor climbed to the top of Pisgah to gaze upon the landscape. If the Sun of Righteousness, even the Lord Jesus, shall shine upon you, you will go forth not only to enjoy Christian life, but to enter into Christian service, and you will go further afield to bring others to Christ.

Then you will begin to grow. That is another effect of the sun, and how wonderfully the sunlight makes things grow. Here we have in our hot-houses little plants that we think so wonderful that we show them to our friends, and put them on our tables as rarities, but I have seen them in the sunny south ten times as large growing in the open fields, because the sun haslookeduponthem. The rarities of our country are the common-places of the land of the sun. I have known Christians who have received a little faith and been perfectly astonished at it, and God has blessed

them with a little love to Jesus, and they have felt as though they were splendid saints; but if they lived in the sunlight they might move mountains by their faith, and their love would lead them to devote their whole life to Jesus, and yet they would not be astonished. The Sun of Righteousness can produce fruits rich and rare. Our cold, sunless land, beneath its cloud and fog, what can it yield in the winter? In more favoured parts of the earth, even in our winter, the trees are golden with fruits. So is it with the soul. What can it grow if it lives in worldliness? What can it produce if it lives to itself? But when it knows the love of Jesus and the power of His grace, even in its worst estate it brings forth the richest and the rarest fruit to the glory of His grace.

Live in the sunlight: get out of the shadows. There are dreary glens in this world where the sun never shines: they are called glens of pleasure, and sometimes the pale moon looks down on them with sickly ray; but the saint knows the light of the sun from the light of the world’s moon. Get away from those chill places into the clearlight. “But,” says one, “I did not know there were joys in religion.” You do not know true religion, then, for it is “a thing of beauty, and a joy for ever.” He who knows Christ has seen the sun, but until he has known Him he has seen but the glow-worm’s glitter.