p. 131 | Dried-up Christians by T. L. Cuyler

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 9, 1872

Dried-up Christians.

By T. L. Cuyler

THIS is the season of droughts. To-day I went up to re-visit the picturesque little waterfall on the Caldeno Creek, which lies up on the mountain back of the Delaware Water Gap. When I saw it last it was foaming over the mossy rock like a miniature Minnehaha. But this morning I found only a bare, dry rock, over the center of which trickled a slender thread of water which was soon lost among the bare stones beneath. The evergreens and the rhododendrons encircled the sweet spot as before; everything was there but the water. The cascade had died of drought.

As I looked at the feeble dribble over the rock, I saw in it a picture of more than one professed disciple of Jesus. There is my friend Hopeful, who was once among the foremost in our Sabbath-schools and our prayer-meetings. He was full of zeal, and beneath all the sound, there seemed to be a great deal of substance. We expected him to prove a perennial disciple, “always abounding” in the work of the Lord. But he has unaccountably dried up. His forsaken Sabbath-school class are dependent on “stated supplies,” or go without a teacher; his seat in the prayer-meeting is empty, and when he comes in to the table where the band of Christ’s followers are commemorating their Master’s love, he is a Thomas among them. The difficulty with our backsliding brother is the same as that with yonder creek on the mountainside. The fountain-head of his graces has run dry, and he has had no heavenly rains upon his parched soul for months. I suspect that he has about abandoned secret prayer, or maintains it as an empty form. When prayer stops, death begins. Just as soon attempt to keep up a fresh fruit-bearing piety without prayer, as to make a tea-rose bloom in a Greenwood vault. I fear, too, that with the decline of secret prayer there has been a stealthy growth of secret sins. The root of the whole melancholy declension is in the heart; and nothing but a thorough heart-work, a deep re-conversion, can ever make brother Hopeful what he was in his days of hale and happy usefulness.

I observe, too, a sad falling off with my neighbor Lovetrade. He was once an open-handed contributor to every enterprise of charity. There was a full stream from his liberal purse which watered many a thirsty spot. But now he gives rarely and stingily. What is to pay? I suspect that somewhere above the falls he has opened a sly cut-off of self-indulgence, which drains away nearly all his income. The water runs into another channel. He has built a four-story “brown-stone front.” I hear of him as driving a pair of full-blooded bays in the Park. His spouse gives grand entertainments, and there are big bills at the wine-merchant’s and the confectioner’s. The “lust of the eye and the pride of life” are drawing off through their greedy outlet the bounteous stream which once made many a heart green with gladness. He only trickles now; he used to pour. Poor Lovetrade will never be a rich man again “toward God,” until he stops up that waste-pipe of selfish extravagance, and lets the current flow back into the old channel. To-day he is sorely tempting Providence to bankrupt him; for his prosperity is fast turning him into a spiritual pauper. The worst of it is that Lovetrade is tainting others by his bad example, and his stingy contributions are finding imitators in the fashionable church he “patronizes” by his presence.

We might multiply these cases of dried-up Christians. Nay, we could point to whole churches which have run as low as Caldeno waterfall. In the pentecostal days of revivals, how they gushed forth in gladness, and sparkled with spiritual joys in the sunshine! What music there was in the cataract! But when the freshet had spent the surplus waters, the rejoicing river shrank back again into a slender rivulet; and they are now “parched with the drought of summer.”

What is the remedy for this fitful, periodic piety, this disgraceful alternation of revival and declension, of foaming fullness and a pitiful dribble of August drought? Did God decree that his people should run low like summer brooks, and is this the normal condition of the church which Jesus redeemed unto himself? Is there not divine fullness which can keep a believer always full to the brim, and can make the whole church as steady in its flow as the majestic currents of Niagara? It is an insult to the divine Author of our holy religion to suppose that, either in its constitution or in that of human nature, there is a necessity for such periodic alternations. Our God is not a fickle, fitful giver of his grace, and his service is not a temporary spasm of excitement; and when the all-sufficient Saviour said, “I am with you alway,” he made no provision for an intermittent Christianity. When Jesus is thoroughly within a man’s heart, and that soul replenishes itself with him, then is he a “well of water springing up into everlasting life.” As Christ is inexhaustible, why should a Christian ever run dry?

Paul was never parched with drought. That stream of living waters which irrigates the earth to this hour had its fountain-head in Christ. “Not I,” exclaimed the glorious old apostle, “not I, but Christ that liveth in me.” And the only reason why any healthy, effective Christian runs full to the banks is that the love of Jesus is welling up into his soul by day by night. His reservoir is infinite, and he is “filled with all the fullness of God.” There are some Christians whom you could no more exhaust by drafts on their graces than you could drain Niagara by tapping its banks with mill-races. And when I meet with a perennial Christian, who never disappoints me, who is always abounding, who is ready for any service, who is as good behind the counter as he is on his knees, who can be as cheerful in a storm as in the sunshine, whose words fall upon a prayer-meeting like the music of an April rain, who lives near to God and yet quite as near to his fellow mortals—when I meet such an one, I know that his inner life is hid with Christ. That everlasting fountain in his heart is as exhaustless as the Godhead!—T. L. Cuyler.