A WONDERFUL DAY!
‘No day like that!’
Joshua 10:14
We shall speak of the power and art of making the sun to stand still. How may we, like Joshua, virtually lengthen out our day of life, how may we even make one day equal to ten?
I. Obviously the first essential requisite is thought and earnestness.—It is not study that I mean, though this is necessary for some courses of life. It is reflection, pondering, keeping oneself mentally awake, and being intent. Are there not many who, though possessed of powerful faculties, allow them to lie in a torpid state, or only waken up dimly at distant intervals? Plainly a life spent without earnestness or purpose may be nominally long, but it is scarcely the shadow of life. I would like to say one word to any one such who may be here, a word that may stick to their memory. You have passed now, I shall say, through twenty or fifteen years; how many of these years have been anything of the nature of a rational, purposeful, earnest life? Make an honest estimate, as you will be obliged to make soon before the face of God. Have there, then, been five out of the twenty really lived with an earnest purpose and according to reflection and reason? Has there been one out of the twenty inspired by a true steadfast purpose—all the rest going to waste—but one gathered up out of the scraps and odds and ends of life; could you manage to piece together one year saved from all the waste? He who fills his life with earnest thought and steadfast purpose is making the sun to wait upon him; he is not allowing the sun to go till it has lighted him to his task; but he who leads a thoughtless, self-indulgent, frivolous life may count a hundred years without truly experiencing one. His life is all empty and vain. Thought is the most powerful lever in any world. I know not what forces there may be in yonder stars, but I know this already, there is no power in any of them equal to thought—the power you carry in your own breast. There is power in thought, in your thought, your reflection, to revolutionise your whole life and to bring all mighty forces to bear upon you. Will you think, then? The thought is your own—it is God’s endowment, God’s gift to you as a rational being. It is no gigantic effort that is required of you. It is only such as men around you are employing every day in ordinary affairs. It is only such as you may have yourself applied often to passing and trivial matters, even to games and amusements. If you would reflect on these great questions and refuse to lay them down till you have settled them, you would make this year equal to ten or twenty years, to all the years of your life, though you may have existed fifty or sixty or more years. Your thought would in the fullest and deepest sense make the sun stand still.
II. The sun stands still for those who are fighting in God’s army.—It depends altogether on what side you are whether the sun and moon will obey you. Often has the cry gone up amid the stress of life, O sun, stand! Why must the years fleet so fast away? Why must the days fly with such terrible rapidity? Already, O sun! thou hast borne away my childhood. The sunny days of childhood and youth come back no more. They are gone—those bright days when I sported by the brook, chased the butterfly and caught the minnows. I shall never more walk with friends who shared thought and feeling in the sprightly glowing days of youth, in which fear and hope and romance mingled like lines in the rainbow. O sun! stand still and steal not away the days of strength and vigour. Stand still. Let things remain as they are. Bring not on decrepitude and decay. O sun! stand still, cries another, thou art measuring out my last day. Go slowly at least. Ere another day dawns I shall have passed into the great unseen. But the inexorable sun heeds not command or entreaty. It marches on the same for the joyous and the sad, the exulting and the condemned to die. But let any one be a soldier in God’s army. Let him march under the banners which bear the words truth, freedom, eternal life, and he will find the day will not be too short. Every day will be lengthened out. There will be more in one of his days than there used to be in a hundred.
III. It was the voice of Joshua, the leader of God’s host, that bade the sun stand still; so it is the voice of our Joshua, Jesus the Captain of our Salvation, that has power over all times and seasons.—If there is any one here that fears lest his day of grace should run done before he has finished his work, let him take this Joshua as his. Is any one mourning—Alas! I have not used the opportunities that my life offered? My life might have been made powerful against evil, mighty for good. What have I done? Nothing or worse. And now the sun is far in the heavens, it is sinking toward evening, what men have I blessed, what weary hearts have I comforted, what sinful souls have I reclaimed? Alas, there are none to wait at heaven’s gate to welcome me to everlasting habitations. Your case is not utterly hopeless, it is not hopeless at all, if you will beseech the great Joshua. He is able to crowd many valiant deeds into a brief space of your life. Jesus will make your earthly existence full, so that though you only live five years, or only one year, that will be a fuller period than the ten, twenty, or fifty years of your previous existence. One year filled with earnest, tender, noble thoughts will be really longer than sixty or seventy. If but the spirit of Christ’s life, His love, His zeal, inspire you, the contents of your life will equal those of ten at least.
Illustrations
(1)‘Jacob Boehme says:—
When Time is as Eternity,
Eternity as Time to thee,
From strife of all kinds thou are free.
For every soldier of God’s army breathes the air of eternity. If you are one of His genuine soldiers you have a right to the air of eternity, and you actually do breathe it. No soldier of God’s can have his strength and courage maintained by the air of time. To be filled with thoughts of eternity is to have every day made as long as ten, deep and wide and high, with a range far beyond the reach of earth; but there is that which is still greater and more expansive and strengthening than eternity.’
(2) ‘To tell the truth no year, no day even, can be made up of patches and fragments thrown together. The true day must be animated by an earnest purpose. No earnest purpose or rational plan can be a thing of mere random broken gleams, It will not do then to take refuge in gleams and snatches that float for a little in the mind and then disappear like bubbles on the stream, or like fragments of music or old ballads that are dimly repeated in memory. Such things have no substance, no reality in them; if there were substance, solidity in them, they would exhibit some permanence.’
(3) ‘Must not Joshua have agonised in spirit as he beheld the quickening pace of the fugitive Amorites, and the slackening pace of his own troops, lest the decisive results of victory were about to elude his grasp? How many a victorious general has longed for only a hour or two more of daylight, that he might reap the fruits of victory? How many a beaten general has longed for the coming of night, to save him from utter rout and destruction? On the afternoon of Waterloo, the Prussian forces not having yet come upon the ground, and the lines of the British having become thin and wavering from the repeated and fiery onsets of the French, Wellington, wiping the bead-drops of agony from his brow, sighed for “Night—night, or Blücher!” ’