1 Kings 20:40 And as your servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the king of Israel said to him, So shall your judgment be… I. THE TRUST OF OUR TIME. Each new day that dawns upon us, each hour that rests with us in its rapid flight, each of the moments which together make up the sum total of our existence, each of these is a trust, not to be used at our mere caprice, not to be cherished or lost just as the passing fancy takes us. Each day, each hour is golden with possibilities of good; of good for ourselves, of self-discipline, of self-culture, of deepening spirituality, of a nearer vision of God; of good for others, of gentle words and kindly deeds, of some task begun for the blessing of our fellows, of some seed sown which shaft ripen at last to a harvest of beneficent achievement. And if the parts of our life are thus a trust, what shall we say of life itself in its entirety? What tremendous possibilities of weal or woe are bound up in the small compass of a single life! But if this be true, as it is, of the life that is bound within the two shores of birth and death, what shall we say of the trust of the soul itself — the soul whose unending life reaches far on into the unknown eternity beyond the grave — the soul, that spark flashed forth from the fire of Eternal Being, ray of light let down to earth from the Central Sun of Universal Existence? Oh, what a trust is this! II. THE FAILURE OF THE TRUST. "As thy servant was busy here and there, and he was gone." "He was gone," what a sad story these words suggest; a charge neglected, a duty unfulfilled, a bitter loss sustained, a dire doom incurred. "It is gone," what a suggestion of inconsolable regret there is in these words, Some trusts once gone may be recovered: lost health may be restored, friends alienated may be won back again: but in life there are some utterly irreparable failures. A young man grieves the fond heart of a loving mother by carelessness or sin; he wanders away, perhaps, into other lands, and by silence and neglect breaks the tender heart he has so deeply shadowed; and then, perhaps, he comes to himself, and he says, "I'll go home, and make up for my hard neglect by special tenderness and care"; and when he gets home he finds that she is gone; that there is now no chance for his late atonement. III. THE EXCUSE FOR FAILURE. "Thy servant was busy here and there, and it was gone." Now, mark you, the excuse was not, "Thy servant was busy." That would have been in one sense a justifiable plea, and not a lame excuse. For life, for the best and the noblest, is always a busy thing. We are in a busy world. Around us we hear on every side the breaking of the unresting waves of human industry and human toil It is plain that the having been busy is not the excuse that we have to consider. Now notice what the excuse really was, "Thy servant was busy here and there." I think that this being busy here and there may fairly be taken to mean that desultory and utterly unsatisfactory kind of being busy in which so many waste their days and miss their chances of good; the busy idleness of the restless child, not the busy industry of the thoughtful and high-purposed man. Now is it not. Just this serious trifling, this spending of our energies on lesser and lower objects, and so withdrawing them from higher and truer and more lasting occupations — is it not just this that will account for half the failures of life? The two great wants in this habit of life are the want of a continuous purpose and of a true and worthy object — a purpose that shall bind all our multiplied actions into one, and so give to our energies and our life that true unity in which alone lies strength; an object great enough and good enough to lend inspiration to flagging energies, and attractiveness to the most trivial tasks needed for its achievement. And this, in the saddest sense of all, is the excuse that will make thousands at the last miss utterly their chances of eternal life. Of those who make what Dante calls "the great refusal"; of those who fail to accept the offers of salvation held out to them in the Gospel of Christ, there are not many, I fancy, who do so deliberately and of set purpose. (Canon O'Meare.) Parallel Verses KJV: And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the king of Israel said unto him, So shall thy judgment be; thyself hast decided it. |
    |