If there be any depressed or discouraged reading these lines, I should like to remind them of God’s promise to give the valley of Achor—that is the depressing scene of your labours, my brother—for a door of hope. You are looking for your hope somewhere else, anywhere else provided it be out of your present rut and drudgery. In reality your door of hope lies in the rut, in the valley itself. It is not escape you need. It is just a braver faith that God is in your valley with you, and that He needs you there.
Take a firmer grip of that, and go back to where you serve, and you will find, please God, that even in your valley He has opened for you a door of Hope and Gladness.
May all those who are living and working these days in the valley of Achor find in it somewhere God’s Door of Hope.
Prayer
Grant us, O God, the faith that in Thy strength we can yet succeed even in the place where we have failed. Teach us that it is Thy whisper we hear, when we have fallen into Despond, bidding us rise and try again. And grant us the courage to be sure, since Thou hast a tryst to meet and help us there, that even our Achor shall open to us its door of hope. Amen.
XXIII
Now-a-Days
“There be many servants nowadays that break away every man from his master.”
1 Samuel 25:10
Nabal, says the Bible, was a churl. When David sent his men to request some provender, in return for services rendered, this ill-mannered sheep-farmer broke out, “Who is David? There be many servants nowadays that break away every man from his master.” It was a singularly rude and ungracious reply, all things considered. But it is not about Nabal’s truculence I wish to speak. I want you to think about that phrase he used, and the tone in which it was said. “Nowadays.” The implication, of course, is that servants did not break away from their masters in his young days. Things were different in the times he could remember.
You will recognise this peculiar intonation of “Nowadays” as something fairly familiar. You hear it yet, quite often. Nowadays the Church has lost caste. Nowadays the Bible is a neglected book. Nowadays faith is on the wane, and most people don’t believe anything at all. There are many such sentences, beginning with the word “nowadays” and sounding like a chant on a minor key.
This pessimistic philosophy is difficult to fight, for it is unsubstantial, and dissolves like mist whenever you come to close quarters. But there are three queries I have noted in my Bible opposite that “Nowadays” of Nabal.
And the first is—What about the man himself? Judge his philosophy by his actions. Nabal apparently believed that servants were getting entirely out of hand, and he speaks as if he remembered something very different in his own early days. Very good. What was he doing to maintain the old standards? Nothing, less than nothing. His personal manners and behaviour were such that servants would be very ready to break away on that farm, I should think. Now, what business has Nabal to go whining, in general terms, mark you, about servants nowadays, when he behaves like a boor to his own? For any declension which he may see about him, he is himself largely responsible.
I think that it is a perfectly fair line of argument, and it disposes of quite a number of pious “inexactitudes.” When I hear a man talking about the lost influence of the Church nowadays, I am always tempted to inquire what his own relation to it is, whether he is loyally supporting it and working in its interests, for experience has taught me that a very great deal of exaltation of the Church’s past records, at the expense of its position today, comes from men who are themselves doing absolutely nothing to help it on its way. There are exceptions, of course, but, as a rule, it is not the active workers in any worthy cause who are lamenting its failure. The men who think the country is going to the dogs are themselves to be found, for the most part, lolling in the clubs. It is not the pledged and active member of Christ’s kingdom who thinks it is disappearing from the earth. And to those who are fond of the nowadays type of complaint, I would suggest the inquiry—What about yourself? Are you helping to keep up the old standards as you say you remember them? Or is your influence also tending to set this ball of the earth rolling in the very direction you deplore, namely, down the hill?
The second query on Nabal’s “Nowadays” is—Can his memory be relied upon? It is an instinct with us all to idealise the past, and gild it in memory with all sorts of romance. We quietly drop all the shadows from the picture as time goes on. Were ever summer days since so long and fine and sunny as they were when we were boys?
