Pliny compares life to a river. The river, small and clear in its origin, gushes forth from rocks, falls into deep glens, and wantons and meanders through a wild and picturesque country; nourishing only the uncultivated tree or flower by its dew or spray. In this, in its state of infancy and youth, it may be compared to the human mind, in which fancy, and strength of imagination, are predominant: it is more beautiful than usual. When the different rills or torrents join, and descend into the plain, it becomes slow and stately in its motions, and able to bear upon its bosom the stately barge. In this mature state, it is deep, strong, and useful. As it flows on towards the sea, it loses its force and its motion, and at last, as it were becomes lost and mingled with the mighty abyss if waters. -Sir Humphery Davy
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Springtime
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| pansy boarder. |
Springtime has come, and as we go out into nature, we receive on
every hand evidences of a new life: the flowers and the trees with their
sweet fragrance and fresh, exuberant verdure: the balmy breezes about
you; the rippling brooklet at your feet; the music of the feathered
concert overhead. All bear testimony, in a language without words, yet
none the less forceful, that spring, the happiest season of the year,
has come, and with it new life and new hopes.
But there is one thing we must not overlook in these our observations
of nature, and that is the thankfulness for this new life that goes up
from all these creatures of nature, animate and inanimate, to God, their
Maker. We can read it in the sweet, blushing petals of the flower, the
merry rippling of the brook, the early morning hymn of praise from the
birds in the thicket. Again, when the hungry throat of the little
nestling is filled by the mouthful of food the mother-bird brings, and
the excited chirping at once ceases, and quite satisfaction takes its
place, can we not again see a thanksgiving to Him who clothes the lilies
of the field, and without whose will no sparrow falls to the earth?
Now, dear reader, there is a lesson to draw from this. You may be a
young man or a young woman, and consequently in the springtime of your
life. And as you have enjoyed to the fullest extent, during these balmy
days, the beauties of nature, you have found your own being throbbing
with new life, and you have been thrilled at the thought of that life’s
possibilities. But have you stopped to ask yourself whether or not you,
like all these creatures of nature, have returned thanks to your Maker
for the new life, hopes and possibilities that are yours? says David.
May that be the lesson that springtime brings us! Sermon by Rev. Carl J. Segerhammer.
More Sermons by Segerhammer:
- Perseverance Conquers or "perseverado vincit!"
- Behold, We Go Up To Jerusalem!
- The Poverty Which Maketh Many Rich
The Early Eden Picture
"Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." Genesis 2: 25. (NIV)
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| "I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day." Moore. |
The distinctive thing about the man is that he is like God. He and God are alike. In this he differs from all creation. He is God's link between Himself and His Creation. Particular pains is taken by repetition and change of phrase to make clear and emphatic that it was in the very image of God that man was made. Just what does it mean that we men were made in God's likeness? Well, the thing has been discussed back and forth a good bit. Probably we will not know fully till we know as we are known. In the morning when we see Him we shall be like Him fully again. Then we'll know. That morning's sun will clear up a lot of fog. But a few things can be said about it now with a positiveness that may clear the air a bit, and help us recognize the dignity of our being, and behave accordingly.
Man came into being by the breath of God. God breathed Himself into man. The breath that God breathed out came into man as life. The very life of man is a bit of God. Man is of the essence of God. Every man is the presence-chamber of God.
God is a Spirit. Man is a Spirit. He lives in a body. He thinks through a mind. He is a spirit, using the body as a dwelling-place, and the mind as his keenest instrument. All the immeasurable possibilities and capacities of spirit being are in man.
God is an infinite spirit. That is, we cannot understand Him fully. He is very close to us. The relationship is most intimate, and tender, yet His fullness is ever beyond our grasp and our ken, Man is infinite in that he knows that God is infinite. Only like can appreciate like. He can appreciate that he cannot appreciate God, except in part. He understands that he does not understand God save in smaller part. He knows enough to love passionately. And through loving as well as through knowing he knows that there is infinitely more that he does not know. Only man of all earth's creation knows this. In this he is like God. The difference between God and man here is in the degree of infinity. That degree of difference is an infinite degree. Yet this is the truth. But more yet: man has this same quality wayward. He is infinite in that he cannot be fully understood in his mental processes and motives. He is beyond grasp fully by his fellow. Even one's most intimate friend who knows most and best must leave unknown more than is known.
God is an eternal spirit. He has always lived. He will live always. He knows no end, at either end. All time before there was time, and after the time-book is shut, is to Him a passing present. Man is an eternal spirit, because of God. He will know no end. He will live always because the breath of God is his very being.
God is love. He yearns for love. He loves. And more, He is love. Man is like God in his yearning for love, in his capacity for love, and in his lovableness. Man must love. He lives only as he loves. True love, and only that, is the real life. He will give up everything for love. He is satisfied only as he loves and finds love. To love is greater than to be loved. One cannot always have both. God does not. But every one may love. Every one does love. And only as there is love, pure and true — however overlaid with what is not so — only so is there life.
God is holy. That word seems to include purity and righteousness. There is utter absence of all that should not be. There is in Him all that should be, and that in fullness beyond our thinking. Man was made holy. There is in the Genesis picture of Eden a touch that for simplicity and yet for revealing the whole swing of moral action is most vivid. In the presence of conditions where man commonly, universally, the world around, and time through, has been and is most sensitive to suggestion of evil there is with this first man the utter absence of any thought of evil. In the light of after history there could be no subtler, stronger statement than this of his holiness, his purity, at this stage.
And in his capacity for holiness, in that intensest longing for purity, and loathing of all else, that comes as the Spirit of God is allowed sway, is revealed again the capacity for God-likeness. It is the prophetic dawn within of that coming Eden when again we shall see His face, and have the original likeness fully restored.
God is wise, all-wise. Among the finest passages of the Christian's classic are those that represent God as personified wisdom. And here wisdom includes all knowledge and justice. That the Spirit of God breathed into man His own mental life is stated most keenly by the man who proverbially embodied in himself this quality of wisdom. "The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord searching out the innermost parts." The allusion is clearly to intellectual powers. There is in man the same quality of mental keenness that searches into things as is in God. It is often dulled, gripped by a sort of stupor, so overlaid you would hardly guess it was there. But, too, as we all know, it often shines out with a startling brilliance. It is less in degree than with God, but it is the same thing, a bit of God in man. This explains man's marvelous achievements in literature, in invention, in science, and in organization.
Two light master-strokes of the etching point in the Eden picture reveal the whole mental equipment of the man. The only sayings of Adam's preserved for us are when God brought to him the woman. She is the occasion for sayings that reveal the mental powers of this first man. Fittingly it is so. Woman, when true to herself, has ever been the occasion for bringing out the best in man. "And the man said, this time it is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; this shall be called woman, because out of man was this one taken. Therefore doth a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and they become one flesh." . . . "And the man called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living." Here is revealed at a glance the keen mental powers at work. Here is the simplicity of statement that marks the speech of strong men. The whole forest is in a single acorn. The whole of a human life is in the primal cell. The chemist knows the whole body by looking into one drop of blood. Here is revealed in one glance the whole man. Mark the keen sense of fitness in the naming of woman — the last and highest creation. Adam was a philologist. His mind was analytical. Inferentially the same keen sense of fitness guided in all the names he had chosen. Here is recognition of the plan for the whole race, a simple unlabored foresight into its growth. A man's relation to his wife, his God-chosen friend, as being the closest of life, and above all others is recognized, together with the consequent obligation upon him. She comes first of all. She becomes the first of all his relationships. The man and the woman — one man and one woman — united, make the true unit of society. Any disturbance of that strikes at the very vitals of society.
And God is a Sovereign — the sovereign of the vast swing of worlds. Man likewise is a sovereign in the realm of nature, and over all the lower creation. He was given dominion, kingship, over all the earth-creation. Man is a king. He is of the blood royal. He was made to command, to administrate, to reign. He is the judge of last appeals on the bench of earth.
But there is more here. The chief characteristic of an absolute sovereign is the imperial power to choose, to decide. Man was made an absolute sovereign in his own will. God is the absolute sovereign. He has made man an absolute sovereign in one realm, that of his will, his power of choice. There is one place where man reigns alone, an absolute autocrat, where not even God can come save as the autocrat desires it, that is in his will. And if that "can" bother you, remember that it was God's sovereign act that made it so. So that God remains sovereign in making man a sovereign in the realm of his will. There every man sits in imperial solitude.
Here then is the picture of man fresh from the hand of God. A spirit, in a body, with an unending life, partly infinite, like God in his capacity for love, for holiness, and wisdom, with the gift of sovereignty over the lower creation, and in his own will. Like Him too in his capacity for fellowship with God. For only like can have fellowship with like. It is only in that in which we are alike that we can have fellowship. These two, God and man, walking side by side, working together, friendship in spirit; partnership in service.
This man is in a garden of trees and bushes, with fruit and flowers and singing birds, roses with no pricking thorns, soft green with no weeds, and no poison ivy, for there is no hate. And he is walking with God, talking familiarly as chosen friend with choicest friend. Together they work in the completion of creation. God brings His created beings one by one to man to be catalogued and named, and accepts his decisions. What a winsome picture. These two, God and a man in His likeness, walking and working side by side; likeness in being; friendship, fellowship in spirit; partnership, comradeship in service. And this is God's thought for man! Gordon.
Spiritural Flood-Tide
"I stood on the coast of England, and looked out over a stretch of oozy slime and ill-smelling mud. There were the barges high and dry, lying on their side–no matter what cargo they carried or how skillful the captain, they were on the mud. It would have availed them nothing to heave the anchor or hoist the sail. And I thought, What is the remedy? Were it any use for the corporation to pass a by-law that every citizen should bring kettles filled with water, and pour it out upon the stretch of mud?
But as I watched I saw the remedy. God turned the tide. In swept the waters of the sea, and buried the mud, and then came the breath of sweetness and life. And it flowed in about the barges, and instantly all was activity. Then heave-ho with the anchor, then hoist the sails, then forth upon some errand of good. So it is that we stand looking out upon many a dreadful evil which fills us with dismay–drunkenness, gambling, sexual impurity. Is there any remedy? And the churches, so very respectable, but, alas, high and dry on the muddy beach–for these too, what is the remedy? We want the flood-tide–the gracious outpouring of the Spirit; then must come the roused and quickened churches, the Christians transformed into Christ-like men and women who shall demand righteousness." Mark Guy Pearce.
Divine Discontent
An unidentified author writes thus of discontent:
When the world was formed and the morn-
ing stars
Upon their paths were sent,
The loftiest-browed of the angels was
named
The Angel of Discontent.
And he dwelt with man in the caves of the
hills,
Where the created serpent stings,
And the tiger tears and the she-wolf howls,
And he told of better things.
And he led man forth in the towered town,
And forth to fields of corn;
And he told of the ampler work ahead
For which the race was born.
And he whispers to men of those hills he sees
In the blush of the golden west;
And they look to the light of his lifted eye
And they hate the name of rest.
In the light of that eye doth the slave be-
hold
A hope that is high and brave,
And the madness of war comes into his
blood
For he knows himself a slave.
The serfs of wrong in the light of that eye
March on with victorious songs;
For the strength of their right comes into
their hearts
When they behold their wrongs.
"Tis by the light of that lifted eye
That error's mists are rent--
A guide to the table-land of Truth
Is the Angel of Discontent.
And still he looks with his lifted eye,
And his glance is far away
On a light that shines on the glimmering
hills
Of a diviner day.
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