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Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing
The same law obtains in the spiritual as in the natural world. He
who abides in darkness will at last lose the power of vision. He is
shut in by a deeper than midnight blackness; and to him the brightest
noontide can bring no light. He “walketh in darkness, and knoweth
not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”
1
John 2:11
. Through persistently cherishing evil, willfully disregarding
the pleadings of divine love, the sinner loses the love for good, the
desire for God, the very capacity to receive the light of heaven. The
invitation of mercy is still full of love, the light is shining as brightly
as when it first dawned upon his soul; but the voice falls on deaf ears,
the light on blinded eyes.
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No soul is ever finally deserted of God, given up to his own ways,
so long as there is any hope of his salvation. “Man turns from God,
not God from him.” Our heavenly Father follows us with appeals and
warnings and assurances of compassion, until further opportunities
and privileges would be wholly in vain. The responsibility rests with
the sinner. By resisting the Spirit of God today, he prepares the way
for a second resistance of light when it comes with mightier power.
Thus he passes on from one stage of resistance to another, until at
last the light will fail to impress, and he will cease to respond in any
measure to the Spirit of God. Then even “the light that is in thee” has
become darkness. The very truth we do know has become so perverted
as to increase the blindness of the soul.
“No man can serve two masters.”—Matthew 6:24.
Christ does not say that man will not or shall not serve two masters,
but that he cannot. The interests of God and the interests of mammon
have no union or sympathy. Just where the conscience of the Christian
warns him to forbear, to deny himself, to stop, just there the worldling
steps over the line, to indulge his selfish propensities. On one side of
the line is the self-denying follower of Christ; on the other side is the
self-indulgent world lover, pandering to fashion, engaging in frivolity,
and pampering himself in forbidden pleasure. On that side of the line
the Christian cannot go.
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No one can occupy a neutral position; there is no middle class,
who neither love God nor serve the enemy of righteousness. Christ is
to live in His human agents and work through their faculties and act