SCHOOLING

SCHOOLING

Do you find joy and strength of heart in discovering how much you need the grace and sympathy of Christ each day? It is what sportsmen call ‘schooling’. This is riding across country, taking every fence in the proposed line. What is ahead is not known, but being well mounted, you are prepared to jump or get over every one of them, some of them doubtless testing the mettle of both rider and horse very much. Many enjoy schooling, they enter on it voluntarily. I give this as an illustration of our day’s exercise here. Do you enter on it cheerfully? It is your duty, and you are set on “his own beast” (see Luke 10: 34), and you ought to welcome your schooling. “The trying of your faith worketh patience” (James 1: 3). We glory in tribulation also. Add to your faith virtue.

With us it is necessary that we should taste death on the vanity of our natural joys and expectations before we can appreciate divine ones. The natural heart seeks for the joys that suit itself, and the joys of God have really no charm for it so long as it thinks it can secure its own. Hence in the Lord’s education of us we have to be weaned; one after the other of the things we thought so much of withers away, or its inability to satisfy our hearts is discovered; and then, like Jacob, the sun gone down, and a ^[p. 171] stone for his pillow, homeless and friendless, the vision of the ladder and the gate of heaven are presented to him! Christ can never appear in the daytime now — I mean in the sphere of earthly brightness. We must find Him now in a new sphere. He died out of this one, and He does not contribute to this one, but He conducts us into His own sphere.