| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 13 |
Page 4 |
Another is discouraged because there seems no blessing on his work.
You are a parent, and you have been laboring and praying for years for your child’s salvation, yet you do not see the hoped for result. You are a teacher, and although you toil with all your might, you do not notice any impression on the lives of those you teach. Or you are a preacher, and you preach with all diligence and faithfulness, but men do not turn to the Lord, and you are heavy hearted and sometimes tempted to give it all up in despair.
But do you really know that your work is not blessed? Do you know that there are no results? Things are not what they seem. The quickest, most evident successes, as they appear to us, are often in reality the worst failures. The least comes of them in the end. In Christian work we have frequently to discount sudden and tropical growths, or at least to fear for their genuineness and permanence. The quiet and gradual growth is usually the truest.
Then we cannot measure spiritual results as we can those which are physical. The artist sees the picture growing upon his canvas as he works day by day. The builder sees the wall rising as he lays stone upon stone. But the spiritual builder is working with invisible blocks, is rearing a fabric whose walls he cannot see. The spiritual artist is painting away in the unseen. His eyes cannot behold the impressions, the touches of beauty he makes.
Sometimes the results of work on human lives may be seen in the expansion and beautifying of character, in the conversion of the ungodly, in the comforting of sorrow, in the uplifting and ennobling of the degraded; and yet much of our work must be done in simple faith, and perhaps in heaven it will be seen that the best results of our lives have been from their unconscious influences, and our most fruitful efforts those we considered in vain.
The old water wheel turns round and round outside the wall. It seems to be idle work that it is doing. You see nothing accomplished. But its shaft runs through the mill wall and turns a great system of machinery there, and makes bread to feed many a hungry mouth. So we toil away, many of us, and oftentimes see no rewards or fruits. But if we are true to God, we are making results somewhere for his glory and the good of others. The shaft runs through into the unseen and turns wheels there, preparing blessings and food for hungry lives. No true work for Christ can ever fail. Somewhere, some time, somehow, there will be results. We need not be discouraged or disheartened, for in due time we shall reap if we faint not. But what if we faint?
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