06.05. Spiritual Environment

Chapter 5 Spiritual Environment

TWENTY years ago the word environment was rarely used. It might occur in scientific treatises, but it was almost wholly unfamiliar to readers of magazines and newspapers. Now it is impossible to escape it. It is the stock phrase with the social reformer, the essayist, the religious teacher. It is perpetually in vogue. And this is due to the fact that we have come to see the immense importance of environment for healthy life. There may be a perfect and vigorous germ, but if the circumstances of its growth are not propitious it will inevitably droop and die. Take, for instance, the child of healthy parents, all whose vital organs are perfectly formed: if it lack proper nourishment, if it be reared in sunless or fetid atmosphere, if the water be tainted and its conditions uncleanly, these things will go far to destroy the advantages of its parentage, and to make the tiny flame flicker ominously in its socket. A perfect peach-blossom may nestle in delicate beauty on the bough of a healthy and prolific tree, but it requires a sunny and propiticus atmosphere, full of morning dews, and night of warm rain, and days of radiant sunlight, before it can weave the luscious, thirst-quenching fruit. And it is so with the fruit of the Spirit--the produce of our life--so rare that the Father will intrust its culture to no other husbandman. It is not enough that we have been born again of the Holy Spirit, and become partakers of the divine nature; we must be careful of our environment, or we shall miss the crown and blossom of our life, to secure which the Son of God died on the cross. But what environment could we have better than is around us always? We sometimes wish that we had been privileged to be present in the upper room when the air was stirred with the advent of the Holy Spirit. But this is still the age of Pentecost, and He is as certainly present with the Church and the individual as He was when He crowned each meek brow with fire.

We think that to have been beside the Apostle Paul when he wrote the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, or beside Peter when he opened the kingdom of heaven to the Gentiles, or beside John when Patmos, girt by the blue AEgean, he beheld heaven’s opened door, would have necessarily done for us what in these degenerate days we have no right to expect.

It is more than probable, however, that we might have had these coveted positions and seen nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, of the spiritual glories that were unfolded to the enraptured vision of these favored souls; while if they were now to share our life, to walk beside us in our streets, sit beside us in our public conveyances, and live beside us in our homes, it is almost certain that they would discern the presence of the Lord, and the realities of the eternal world, with as much precision as they did in the old days, rapidly receding across the ocean of the centuries. The Spirit of God is with the Church. Every day may be to her a day of Pentecost. The living Christ is here amid the golden candlesticks. There is as much of God in the place where these words are being read as in heaven itself. It is not needful to go back into the past or forward into the future to find Him--He is there. All around us is the blessed atmosphere of the eternal and spiritual. It is a mistake to sigh for anything more than this. whatever is needed for the nurture of a noble, useful, and blessed life is as near us as the ocean to the scale of the fish, or the sunbeams to the gorgeous plumage of the humming-bird. But something more is necessary. The environment of peach or animal or child may be all that could be desired for its nurture and beauty, but the organism itself must have the faculty of extracting and absorbing the qualities it needs. Of what use are sunbeams and dewdrops, if the peach blossoms cannot transmute them into the fruit which exists only in rudimentary form? Of what avail the rich provisions that strew the ground, if the infant’s digestion cannot avail itself of their nutriment? And so we must do more than live in the greatest age that has ever passed over our world. We must recognize it, and be glad of it, and appropriate its treasures, weaving them into the fabric of our soul, the structure of our life. This is where so many of us fail. It is not that our age is degenerate, and our opportunities mean and poor, but that we do not know how to use our environment, extracting from it its priceless gifts, and assimilating them in the inner man.

There is as much electricity among the degraded Hottentots as in London, but it is of no avail to them, since they know not how to beckon it from the clouds and yoke it to their chariots. Probably there are forces throbbing around us of which Christ availed Himself in the working of His miracles, but of which we know nothing. They are within our reach, but they do not help us, because we do not recognize them; or even if we were aware of their existence, we should not know how to catch and tame and use them. So the mightiest forces of the spiritual world are nigh us, even in our mouth and heart, but the method of appropriating their blessed properties is largely a lost one to the Church.

It is we who require changing, not our environment. Like Jacob, we must be still and sleep, that we may see the shining ladders linking our mean lives with heaven, while angels go to and fro. Like the two disciples, we must share our slender meal with the stranger at the village inn, that the scales may fall from our eyes, and we see the Lord beside us. Moreover, we need grace to appropriate.

It is instructive to notice how each living thing takes from the sunbeam what it wants--one its aroma, another its color, a third its luscious taste. So should we extract from Christ whatever we require to complete our character. The short-tempered must take patience; the passionate, purity; the cowardly, moral strength; the domineering, patience; the downcast, comfort. We must not simply pray for them, but take them. This holy boldness is our right. We know that whatsoever we ask, which is guaranteed by any promise of God, we receive of Him, not in some distant time or place, but here and now; and we may so surely reckon that we have received as to be warranted in going forth and acting on the assumption that there has been a real accession of grace to our soul, enabling us to do what before would have been utterly beyond our power.

Let us not then sigh for the lost age of gold, since the King of all ages is here. Let us not blame our circumstances or surroundings, which the great Husbandman has arranged with the most careful consideration of what would best promote our welfare. Let us receive as well as ask, take as well as entreat, use what we know God has given, in the absence of any rapturous emotion, and only knowing that He is faithful and cannot disappoint the trustful soul. In brief, let us abide in Christ; let us keep ourselves in the love of God; let us carefully derive from the "all things" which God has given us, as profitable for life and godliness, the whole wealth of helpfulness that we need, and that they were intended to convey.

Thus, in a deeper sense than is sometimes realized, "All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s."