| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 3 |
Page 7 |
“Always keep sweet, and go on singing,” is a good motto. Easy, do you say? Only a lesson for children? Do you think so? Did you ever try to live it out for a week, even for a day? The perfection of Christian living is included in this motto. He who has learned to live by this rule has reached a high attainment. Yet it is thus we are to seek to live continually. We should overcome our morbidity, our unwholesomeness of temperament, and should train ourselves to see beauty in all things, and good in every experience.
In order to do this we must have the beauty and the good in ourselves. “You must have the bird in your heart before you can find the bird in the bush.” So we must have bird songs in our soul, or we cannot hear bird songs in the groves. Mr. Burroughs tells of a woman who asked a bird lover where she could hear the bluebird. “What, never heard the bluebird!” said he. “Then you never will hear it.” He could have taken her in a few minutes where a bluebird’s song or warble would fall upon her ears to hear it. They were not sensitized by love for birds. It requires a special organ, as it were, a power either given in creation, or acquired by long training to hear the voices of nature.
So it is with other things. An earthly mind cannot hear heavenly voices. An unspiritual person finds no beauty in the Bible. Spiritual things can be only spiritually discerned. We must have the peace of God in our bosom; and then, and then only, we shall find the peace of God in all things, even in life’s wildest storms. We must have the joy of Christ within us; and then, and only then, all earth’s noises, even its roaring thunder, will make music of angel voices in our ears.
We cannot change the world, taking out all its thorns, making its tasks easy and its burdens light, modulating all its discords into harmonies, transforming its ugliness into beauty; but we can have our own hearts renewed by the grace of God, and thus the world will be made over for us. A new heart makes all things new. A heart of love will find love everywhere. A soul full of song will find sweet music everywhere.
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