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Arrives now my 73rd September, so I feel entitled
to wax philosophical about the calendar’s turn to the month that ushers in Autumn.
There’s something magical, mystical, even titillating about it. Long years ago, September meant back to school for me.
Out came the Sears-Roebuck catalog and my order for blue jeans and flannel shirts paid with funds I had earned caddying
on the golf course. Too soon school years passed and September found me with
the Air Force in places like California, Greenland, Alabama, New Mexico, Japan, and Germany, discovering that the ninth month was marked with unique adventures and expectations. Then
I found the Red Cross was dispatching me to places like Guam, Saipan, and Puerto Rico as September brought typhoons and hurricanes. Still later, hopping all the continents for the Peace Corps and finding my faithful
balance on our tilting planet as the seasons whirled by was an exhilarating ride. Brooks Atkinson helps me to revel in
gratitude for the meaning of seasons with his essay Smoke From A Valley Cabin:
“The Seasons! If we could understand them, not scientifically but
spiritually, if we knew why they come so silently and why they are so forceful, might we not analyze the essence of immortal
life? Although we hastily regard them as a thing apart from ourselves, we are
really united to them closely. Not merely because they bring the harvest upon
which we depend, or because they fertilize the soil with falling leaves and store the mountains with the water we need in
spring and summer; but because as natural beings we are drawn into their movement, emotionally and physically. Winter, spring, summer and autumn regulate our lives; willy-nilly, they govern our daily and yearly progress. We have not yet come so far from primeval nature that we can remain indifferent to
them.” September’s message for me seems
to say that precious time is ebbing away. Ergo, I
send up a Deo Gratis for all my past Septembers as I ponder the remaining ones
dwindle down to a precious few. AΩ
Beyond the reproduction in the believer’s spiritual life of
his Lord’s death and burial lies the glorious fact of union with Christ in His resurrection ….Only those who through
Christ have entered into a vital relationship to God are really “alive.”
Existence outside of Christ is not worthy of the name at all; for as compared with a soul that has seen everything
in heaven and earth transfigured by a personal experience of redemption and has begun to live daily in the romance and wonder
and thrilling stimulus of Jesus’ fellowship, the man who lives for the world and the flesh and has no knowledge of God
is virtually dead. He does not know it, he thinks he is “seeing life”;
he cannot guess the glory he is missing, nor realize the utter bankruptcy and wretchedness of everything in which he has put
his trust. James S. Stewart, Mysticism
and Morality.
We have a relationship that can never be changed; we’re sons of God, children of the most high. We have a righteousness that can never be tarnished, the very righteousness of Christ
Himself. We have a Resource that can never be diminished - it’s the power of the spirit of God. We have a
peace that can never be destroyed, for it’s the God of Peace Himself. We have a joy that can never be surpassed, what scripture calls unspeakable
and full of glory. We have a love that will never let us go -- God’s unconditional love. We have an intercessor
whose prayers can never be unanswered, the spirit of Christ within us. And we
have a sovereign Lord who can never lose control, the King of kings Himself.
Dr. Donald G. Barnhouse
Are we to take the Pauline
language of intimate personal communion with the risen Lord, and dismiss it as unrealistic and neurotic, the cliché’
of a religion whose emotionalism is stronger than its logic? Are we to exclude
the evidence of all the men and women of nineteen centuries who have testified that in the fellowship of the living Christ
they have found a force that transformed their lives? Not if we are honest with
the facts. Was it empty rhetoric when David Livingston said it was not just himself
who went tramping through darkest Africa: it was David Livingston and Jesus Christ
together? Was it fever or delirium when Samuel Rutherford wrote to a friend from
prison: “Jesus Christ came into my cell last night, and every stone flashed
like a ruby”? These things are fact….This intimacy of companionship
with Christ, so central for Paul, is faith’s cardinal conviction in every age….Someone there….And this also
is in it when we say,
“Remember Jesus risen from the dead!” James S. Stewart, The Unseen Companionship
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