The Fountain of Life by J. H. Jowett

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 2, 1903

The Fountain of Life

By J. H. Jowett

My brethren in the ministry, our great peril is that we get away from the great source of renewal. The great peril of Christian workers, of Christian missions, of the Christian ministry, is this—exhaustion. If we get away from the forces of re-creation, it is inevitable that the flame of love will die down into the socket, and will soon go out into the night.

The inner life needs to be renewed, restored, re-enforced, reinvigorated. How are we going to do it? We shall have to be wooed to the springs. We shall have to look to the great Lover, who is the great Renewer, the great re-Maker of the souls for which he died. It is just here where we have the difficulty in the lives of countless hosts. We arrange for expenditure of force, and we do not arrange for its renewal. We devise channels, and we ignore springs.

We live in an age which is very prone to magnify the sermon on the mount and to minimize the Gospel by St. John. We live in an age which is very much inclined vehemently to disparage doctrine, that it may the more readily eulogize practice. The service of man is portrayed, and fellowship and communion with God in Christ is obscured. Men say, “We will be practical men, and the unseen and the eternal can be regarded as uninfluential and unimportant.” My brethren, you may as well go and check the gas mains near the storage meter, and then go and try to light the gas in the lamps in the city. You may as well cut the electric cables which connect these electric lights with the dynamos, and then seek to illuminate the hall. You may as well close all the ventilators, and all the windows, and all the doors, and plaster up every chink and crevice, and then sit down and pass a resolution in favor of fresh air. “We will love, we will love, we will love; we will be philanthropists; but we will have no theology. We will have practice, but we will have no doctrine; we will have the fifth chapter of Matthew, but we will not have the third chapter of John.”

Where is the cardinal defect? The cardinal defect is this: How are you going to keep your love alive? How are you going to keep your philanthropy from wearying if it is not renewed? Not many years ago a society was formed, having for its foundation idea the idea I have just named. It was called the Secularist Society, a society whose program was this: Its interests should be confined entirely to things secular and things temporal, and no regard should be paid to things unseen and eternal. It did not propose to deny God. It only proposed to ignore him. It was to be philanthropic, purely philanthropic. It would be humanitarian and beneficent in its work; but it would not have one jot or title of theology in its constitution. It would love, love, love. Ah, me! The defect in its constitution was this, that it made no provision for the sustenance of the very spirit which it professed to embody. And where are the secularist societies now? Make inquiry for them, inquire as to their growth, inquire more particularly as to the breadth of their sympathy and to the schemes of their practical enterprise. How fares it with them? Their lamps are going out because they have no oil. They forgot, in drawing up their constitution, that even lamps needed feeding, and that if a man would keep his lamp burning, he must take with him a vessel of oil. They forgot that even love itself needs to be fed, that even the very spirit of philanthropy needs to be renewed; and because in their very constitution they cut themselves away from the very sources and springs, their resources are exhausted, and I for one am exceedingly skeptical of any scheme of philanthropy which makes no provision for the continuance of the spirit of philanthropy.

I am skeptical of any plan for loving which ignores the sources by which love itself is to be sustained. I think it is equally true of love in the purely domestic circle. I do not know what my brother ministers here feel, but I confess that sometimes when I conduct the marriage ceremony, I have an inward shrinking, an inward fear. How easily the bride to the bridegroom and the bridegroom to the bride promise to love and to cherish “till God in death do us part.” They all pledge themselves that they will love. How many of them make provision for the sustenance of that love? Love itself needs feeding; love itself needs recreating, and I declare it to be my conviction that much of the looseness which prevails in wedded life to-day is due to the fact that the love of the husband to the wife and of the wife to the husband is cut away from the eternal spring. They promise to love; they make no provision for the sweet and full persistence of love. Our inner man, the inner sentiment, the inner spirit of faithfulness, of philanthropy, needs to be renewed. We can not love on the impulse of yesterday. If we wish our lives to be kept fresh, beneficent, triumphant, we must keep near the Renewer, near the Maker, the re-Maker of souls. A phrase of the psalmist expresses what I want to say, “All my springs are in Thee,” and even though I be engaged in beneficent service, if I am cut away from the springs, I am confronted with inevitable impoverishment and exhaustion. —Rev. J. H. Jowett.