June 25, Evening

C. H. Spurgeon · Modern retelling

"The dove found no rest for the sole of her foot." — Genesis 8:9 · KJV

Reader, can you find rest anywhere apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then be sure your religion is empty. Are you satisfied with something less than a conscious knowledge that you are joined to Christ and have a share in Him? Then it will go badly with you. If you claim to be a Christian and yet find complete satisfaction in worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is false. If your soul can stretch out at ease in the rooms of sin, finding the bed long enough and the blanket wide enough to cover her, then you are only pretending, and you are far from any true thought of Christ or any perception of how precious He is. But suppose it is otherwise. Suppose you feel that even if you could sin without punishment, the sin itself would still be punishment; that if you could own the whole world and keep it forever, it would be misery enough never to be parted from it, because your God, your own God, is what your soul is craving. Then take courage: you are a child of God. With all your sins and failures, let this comfort you. If your soul finds no rest in sin, you are not what the sinner is. If you are still crying and longing for something better, Christ has not forgotten you, for you have not entirely forgotten Him. The believer cannot manage without his Lord; words are too small to carry his thoughts of Him. We cannot live on the sand of the wilderness; we need the manna that falls from above. Our flimsy water skins of self-confidence cannot yield us a drop, but we drink from the rock that follows us, and that rock is Christ. When you feed on Him, your soul can sing, "He hath satisfied my mouth with good things, so that my youth is renewed like the eagle's." Without Him, your overflowing winepress and full barn can give you no satisfaction at all; better to lament over them in the words of wisdom, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"