Another year is nearing its close, a new one is about to begin. So men count time, tho every day ought to be a fresh and better beginning. Many persons will look back over the year past with regret, sadness, disappointment. “Its flowers are faded, its wine is spilled,” and its fruit is Dead Sea apples, bitter as gall, and ashes to the touch. Others look back with a great degree of satisfaction because of financial prosperity. Business has gone swimmingly, profits are large, and assets have greatly increased. Surely it is a time to be glad. And yet the joy will ever prove brief and unsatisfactory if it be based only on worldly profit. There are books to be balanced which involve more than mere profit and loss in money matters. Character is more important than gold and stocks; righteousness is greater than real estate. The importance of the harvest in the moral field outweighs infinitely the material harvests of earth. The latter are but temporal; the former is eternal. The only way to measure the gains of the past year is by the standard of eternal righteousness. All gain not founded in that will prove as evanescent as a fading flower. Judged by this standard, all over the past, in the white light of righteousness, the human sees written the one word, “Failure,”—failure in principle, motive, method. Many will look back upon the year of failure, and, as all through the year, others have done, settle down to despair, or take their own lives, and pass out into the great unknown. This is cowardly and wrong. “While there is life, there is hope.” Reform, build anew; let this be the unswerving purpose. But how? is the important question. It will not be by resolution or by promises, or by mere regret or sorrow or remorse, if we go right on in the old way. All these are right in themselves and in their place, but of themselves will effect nothing. No resolve that man may repeat will affect him, unless he possess power to enact it into deed. Sorrow and regret over the past are good, but they are emotional and will not last unless there is a living principle of righteousness back of the sorrow. Theirs is “the sorrow of the world,” which mourns over disaster and discovery and lack of fruit, but such sorrow works death, and the sorrow itself needs to be repented of. But godly sorrow worketh repentance, not to be repented of; it works a re-formation. It utterly repudiates the sin, the selfishness, and takes hold upon the living principles of righteousness in Christ Jesus. True sorrow according to God does not stay to grieve over the tomb of departed hopes. It may look into the empty sepulcher to see that the Master of Life has gone, but it turns from the vacant tomb and follows Him. He will cover all the defects, the mistakes, the sins, the failures of the past if we will let them be past, with His own perfect righteousness. He will invest us with His own mighty power over sin. He will give us authority over all the powers of darkness. Undreamed-of things will He do for us if we will disconnect from the selfishness and sin, from the dead past of human failure, and enlist under His glorious banner of righteousness, freedom, right, and progress. He may not lead you in a smooth flower-bordered path, through a lovely valley of delightful arbors inviting to slumbrous ease. We know He will not do this. He calls you to the church militant, in which when you pray for victory you will be willing to wage warfare in His strength to win it. But He will give the victory. Your road will lie over rough and rugged mountain steeps, in which the feet will be often bruised and weary; but the blood-stained marks of His footprints may be seen before us all the way, and by our side He still walks holding our hand that our footsteps slip not. The way winds through deserts dry and drear and barren, but ever as we need we may find the water of life flowing free from the great welling depths of God’s life, and we may drink and be refreshed. Then, dear hearts, be encouraged. Let neither the failures of the past nor fears of the future mar your present enjoyment and companionship with Christ Jesus in His service. “What saith the past to thee?—‘Weep!
Truth is departed;
Beauty hath died like the dream of a sleep,
Love is faint-hearted.’
Trifles of sense, the profoundly unreal,
Scare from our spirits God’s holy ideal,
So as a funeral bell, slowly and deep,
So tolls the past to thee. ‘Weep!’” “How speaks the Present Hour? ‘Act!
Walk, upward glancing,
So shall thy footsteps in glory be traced,
Slow, but advancing.
Scorn not the smallness of daily endeavor,
Let the great meaning ennoble it ever;
Droop not o’er efforts expended in vain:
Work as believing that labor is gain.’” “What doth the Future say? ‘Hope!
Turn thy face sunward!
Look where light fringes the far-rising slope,
Day cometh onward.
Watch! tho so long be the twilight delaying,
Let the first sunbeam arise on the praying:
Fear not, for greater is God by thy side,
Than armies of Satan against thee allied.’”